Since life left the oceans, about 500 million years ago, and spread to all continents, the Earth has suffered a fair number of mass extinctions, five of which are particularly serious, because each time they killed more than 80% of existing life, and there are no Too much of a relief, though, enough to put entire habitats at risk and drive a large percentage of species to extinction.
Of the five most devastating extinctions, the greatest was undoubtedly the one that occurred 251 million years ago, on the border between the Permian and the Triassic, when more than 90% of living species disappeared forever. Its cause was sudden climate change caused by unbridled volcanic activity that was unprecedented in the history of our planet.
The combination of volcanoes and climate change was later repeated on other occasions, even in the last great mass extinction, which was “ended” by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago but was already brewing with eruptions that gave rise to the “volcanic eruption.” Deccan Traps, an igneous province with 500,000 square kilometers of lava 2 kilometers thick. During that last great extinction, the dinosaurs disappeared, and with them more than 75% of all species living at that time.
Now, a new study by New York University biologist Michael Rampino has concluded that for at least the past 260 million years, all mass extinctions that have affected Earth, without exception, have been due to massive volcanic eruptions and the resulting environmental crises. But not only that, but these explosions and their consequences are repeated periodically, once every 26 to 33 million years, and coincide with a series of changes in the Earth’s orbit that follow the same periodic pattern.
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