00:00We all know that an asteroid crashed into our planet and killed off the dinosaurs.
00:07But what if I told you that wasn't even the most extreme extinction event Earth has ever seen?
00:11And that a terrestrial event was what killed off more creatures on our planet than something from outer space?
00:16The Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, also known as the Great Dying, was the worst mass extinction ever,
00:22resulting in the dying off of some 81% of all marine life and a further 70% of our planet's vertebrate species.
00:29But now, by investigating markers hidden deep within rocks from that period,
00:32scientists now say they might know what actually happened 252 million years ago.
00:37Geoscientists look specifically at mercury isotopes, as they tend to retain signs of volcanic activity much better than others,
00:43finding that those isotopes peaked at the end of the Permian era, right when the extinction occurred.
00:48What's more, we know our planet featured a single unified continent called Pangaea at the time,
00:52meaning all of our planet's land volcanoes were much closer together, and so was the biological life that lived on it.
00:58And the researchers point out that this new evidence also backs up the idea that the extinction didn't happen all at once,
01:03but rather gradually over around 600,000 years, with the researchers writing,
01:07it wasn't just one very bad day on Earth, so to speak.
01:10It took some time to build, and this feeds in well into the new results,
01:13because it suggests the volcanism was the root cause.
01:16The Root Cause
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