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Atlantic <br />Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended <br />All Life on Earth <br />A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction. <br />Lightning strikes near Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyorning. Devil's Tower is surrounded by the red rocks of the Permian period. <br />Mike Hollingshead / Corbis / Getty <br />PETER BRANNEN i JUL 11, 2017 ! '° C, =.. <br />` HO YOU WITH ?" <br />"I'm a science journalist," I said, jolted from my reverie on the shoulder of I -68 in Maryland, where a crowd of <br />geologists had gathered on a field trip to poke at some rocks revealed by the highway department's dynamite. The <br />rocks, slate gray and studded with pebbles from a punishing ice age, spoke to a mysterious global die -off at the end of the Devonian period, <br />hundreds of millions of years ago. <br />"I'm researching a book on mass extinctions," I said. <br />"Cool, I work on the end - Permian boundary in Wyoming." <br />My ears perked up. He was talking about a line in the rocks that recorded the greatest catastrophe the Earth has endured in its entire history. <br />"I didn't really realize there was a —" <br />"Let's go out there. Want to go out next week ?" <br />