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This was my introduction to Jonathan Knapp, a PhD candidate at West Virginia University. The surprisingly bold introductory exchange, I
<br />would later learn, was not atypical for Knapp, for whom there are no half measures. A week later I was in his passenger seat on a road trip
<br />across the country to Wyoming to see the worst thing that's ever happened in person: the end - Permian mass extinction.
<br />Imagine you took a random spin in a time machine and ended up in the Permian. Now imagine the time machine breaks down. You slam
<br />your fists on the dashboard and a digital red "2 51.9 MYA' dimly flickers and dies. The view out the cockpit window reveals red sand dunes
<br />and little else. From what you remember of your geology training you know that 2 5 2 million years ago is just about the worst thing you could
<br />possibly read on your display.
<br />You kick the door open and —holy hell is it hot. You scarcely believe your breath. As you reach for the latch to slam it shut you're startled by a
<br />thundering roar coming from the other side of the dunes. Curious, you step out into the primeval landscape. There's no life, save a wilting
<br />weed here or there, where the dunes give way to barren soils, cracked and crusted with salt. The sandblasted husk of some odd creature
<br />sprawls across the wastes, its fangs bared.
<br />A sole mayfly buzzes in and out of your sight —its presence in this desolate wilderness is comforting. Scrambling over the red sand, and
<br />gasping for air, you follow the distant roar. You notice that, though the sun is out, there's a funereal gloom to the day. As you crest the dunes
<br />you see why. A strange ocean spreads out before you, hosting the largest waves you've ever seen. They're eerily backlit and slosh a sickly
<br />purple and green. Through the haze, and over the roiling ocean, a sublime darkness organizes on the horizon.
<br />You walk down to the shoreline and take a few steps into the lapping waters, drawn toward the enveloping gloom. The seawater is almost
<br />painfully hot. There's nothing alive under the waves. There doesn't seem to be anything alive anywhere really. You squint and marvel at the
<br />growing terror on the horizon. You've seen billowing thunderclouds before, but this panoramic tempest seems to tower into eternity. Wild
<br />hot winds begin to whip in all directions. You find it difficult to breathe. Slowly baking, you know should head back to the temporary safety
<br />of the ship, but you linger here all alone on the dimming coast, transfixed by the blossoming apocalypse just over the Earth's curve. A putrid
<br />odor begins to ride in on the swirling winds and, as you finally turn back in a panic, you pass out. Before long, this doomsday storm makes
<br />landfall, and what meager life clings to this country is stamped out for millions of years.
<br />This is one vision of what it might have been like to visit the world as it ended a quarter billion years ago during the end - Permian mass
<br />extinction —the worst moment in the planet's entire history. The nightmare was sketched for me by the head of geosciences at Pennsylvania
<br />State University, Lee Kump, whose "horror movie" speculation was that there might have turbocharged "hypercanes" of almost
<br />unbelievable intensity assaulting the supercontinent Pangaea —the result of runaway global warming. These mega- storms might have had
<br />500 -mph winds, filled with poisonous hydrogen sulfide sucked out of a rotting ocean that topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
<br />Admittedly, this is mostly Kump's speculation, but we do know that something apocalyptic was unfolding then, when the Earth suffered a
<br />catastrophe that nearly sterilized the planet. Once magnificent coral reefs, built of strange Paleozoic creatures, and hosting a party of
<br />tentacles, trilobites and technicolor fish, were turned into piles of bacterial slime, as oxygen - starved and rapidly acidifying seas spread out
<br />onto the shelves, killing almost everything in the ocean. The planet's forests all but disappeared for almost 10 million years. With Earth's
<br />vegetation destroyed, rivers stopped meandering in narrow channels, instead spilling forth in wide, sloppily braiding torrents. Even insects
<br />suffered a mass extinction, their only such misfortune across all of natural history. Meanwhile an odd menagerie of misfit proto - mammalian
<br />offshoots —some rhinolike and lumbering, others lupine and athletic —seem to have been nearly wiped out. Fungus spread across the Earth.
<br />The cause of all this misery —a growing consensus of paleontologists and geologists believe —was burning fossil fuels. Though acid rain and
<br />a ravaged ozone layer likely played a role as well, geochemical signals in the layers of ancient rock that capture the global die -off suggest a
<br />carbon dioxide - driven global warming catastrophe —one so profound it would dwarf even the extraterrestrial disaster that cut short the
<br />dinosaurs' reign almost 200 million years later.
<br />Near the top of the supercontinent Pangaea in what is now Siberia, a gigantic plume of magma— enough to cover the lower 48 states a
<br />kilometer deep —was burbling through one of the most coal -rich regions in the world and covering millions of square miles of Pangaean
<br />countryside in basalt lava. As the molten rock ponded underground, seeping sideways into the crust, it incinerated not only untold seams of
<br />coal laid down by ancient forests in the hundred million years before, but huge deposits of oil and natural gas as well. The ignited oil and gas
<br />exploded at the surface, leaving behind half -mile craters. The volcanoes injected as much as 40,000 gigatons of carbon into the
<br />atmosphere. This unthinkable volcanism, and the greenhouse gases it liberated, account for the extreme global warming and ocean
<br />acidification seen in the rocks spanning the dreaded Permian - Triassic boundary. It's even been called The Great Dying. Carbon dioxide, it
<br />seems, nearly killed the planet.
<br />WAS PICKED up at Midway Airport in Chicago in a forest -green Jeep Wrangler. Knapp, an oil geologist, had plastered a geological time scale to
<br />the center console, and the trunk was filled to the roof with rocks, camping equipment and two luxuriant, wool - lined, full- length farwa coats
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