grue , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Mass extinction events have a cause. The Permian/Triassic one I mentioned, is generally agreed to be from unusual movement of earth’s crust, creating severe volcanic activity.

I think you'd get your point across even better with less understatement.

Let's put it this way: by "severe volcanic activity," what you really mean is that an area roughly the size of Europe was buried half a kilometer deep in lava!

We have barely existed on earth, but are throwing it off balance like never before. (With the exception of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, but that’s a whole other tangent)

I think we may very well be on par with the meteor, TBH. Especially in the worst-case emission scenario.

(Speaking of the K-Pg meteor, another large igneous province, similar to but smaller than the one at the P-T boundary, was basically the "exit wound" of that meteor impact. It could very well be that the P-T extinction was caused the same way, but all evidence of the crator would have been obliterated by subduction over the past 250 MY because the antipode of Siberia back then would've been somewhere in the middle of the Panthalassic Ocean. Edit: I take that back; turns out there is some evidence for it that managed to survive, so that's neat.)