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Knapp provided an insider's perspective on the industry: he champions natural gas as a "bridge fuel" to a zero - carbon economy (certainly a debatable strategy at this late stage in the world's carbon budget crisis) and is the part -owner of a drill rig in Michigan, but insists that if we burn all our coal, an end - Permian catastrophe isn't out of the question. Near Lawrence, Kansas, at the gateway to the prairie, Knapp swerved off the highway and pulled over next to an unremarkable road cut. He invited me to look closer. There were fossil seashells everywhere and, in some of the layers, ancient plant roots dug down into the fossilized muck. He pointed toward an oval knob sticking out of the ancient strata. "Lungfish burrow," he said. "This was normal. This was life. There was everything here. The world was happy." This was before the Permian. After driving for three more hours into south - central Kansas on the border with Oklahoma, the prairie fell away and the landscape suddenly took on an alien aspect. Everything went rusty red, and the unending flatness gave way to ragged crimson hills and buttes. Shimmering seams of salt and gypsum crystals from dried up seas slumped out of the hillsides like shattered glass. There were no more shells, no more lungfish burrows, no fossils, nothing. It didn't look like any version of Kansas I had ever pictured, or really much like any place I'd ever seen, for that matter. Once again Knapp swerved onto to the shoulder. "Permian ?" I asked. Knapp nodded as he stepped out of the car and pulled a thicket of tumbleweed out of a gully. He invited me to crawl under a barbed -wire fence to take a closer look at the rocks. I grumbled that I wasn't eager to be shot for trespassing. "Trespassing is a vital skill for geologists," he retorted. These were the Gyp Hills near the border of Oklahoma in central Kansas. The unusually hilly terrain (for Kansas) is a product of the enormous Permian salt layers that had dissolved underground, giving the region its strange topography. Some of the hills had crosses on them (memorials for the Permian, I liked to imagine). This was no country for Kansas farmland. Here the earth was literally salted, from dried -up Permian seas. Some of these dissolved Permian salt layers have formed caverns underground, which are used to store reservoirs of fossil fuel. Earlier in the trip we'd dropped by the University of Kansas core lab in Lawrence, Kansas, an Indiana Jones -style warehouse of ancient wonders: cylinders of rock drilled out from the far corners of the state. Knapp pulled out a famous core from the same rocks as those we'd seen in the Gyp Hills, a core that had been drilled a half - century ago by Amoco in search of oil. The rock alternated between Martian - looking dusty reds to huge sections of pure salt. In 2013 Knapp's advisor at West Virginia, Kathleen Benison (then at the University of Kansas) found that lake water trapped in the salt reached literally otherworldly temperatures on the day that it was sealed away in these rocks, as high as 163.4 degrees Fahrenheit. "These are the most extreme conditions in all of Earth's history that we have a record of," says Knapp. Even stranger, this was happening on an Earth that, not long before, had had ice on its poles. "It's a different planet." Unsurprisingly, there's no life in these ghastly rocks (even most plant life checks out at temperatures not much more than 40 degrees Celsius), making them exceedingly difficult to date. "There's absolutely nothing to date in any of these rocks because everything's dead," says Knapp. "But what we can say is that this is definitely Permian." "It should be a national priority to study the Permian to figure out what the hell happened." The rocks most likely predate the greatest mass extinction of all time, possibly by millions of years. They may be indicative of a world that was stumbling toward its date with Armageddon, its supercontinental configuration malting life on Earth increasingly unpleasant. The