Science

Short video showing rock layers being laid down during the Permian and Triassic periods, and background information on the mass extinctions that occurred at this time.

The BBC provides news that what appears to be a 480km-wide crater has been detected under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and may have been responsible for the extinction at the boundary of the Permian and Triassic.

BBC News describes how Chinese rock evidence suggests that the biggest of the Earth's mass extinctions did not happen in one cataclysmic event.

Article by Andrew Alden proposing that new evidence and old, both support a volcanic explanation for this mass extinction when nine tenths of all species disappeared.

Paper by James A. Marusek, providing a hypothesis of the mechanisms behind the greatest mass extinction of life on Earth, the Permian extinction. The hypothesis is applicable to 5 of the 6 Great mass extinction events that occurred at the end of the Botomian, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous Ages.