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"One thing I don't see anywhere here is roots," he said. "At the top of that rock over therein the Triassic, we start to see tons of roots. It's the same depositional environment as here. But here everything's dead." Here, at the end of my pilgrimage, I picked off a rock from this end - Permian wall and turned it over in my hand. As this pebble was forged, 90% of life on Earth was going extinct, even at the poles. Faraway in northern Pangaea volcanoes burning through fossil fuels were ruining the planet for everyone, driving global warming and ocean chemistry changes that nearly rid the planet of complex life. E STILL HAD one final sightseeing adventure in Wyoming, a four -hour detour. We were off to see an open -pit coal mine. And not just any open -pit coal mine, the largest surface coal mine in North America. Though there aren't many landmarks to lead you through eastern Wyoming —save prairie grass —the colossal open -pit coal mines of the Powder River Basin are easy to find. "We've just got to follow the train tracks," Knapp said. We kept the tracks to our left and kept pace with a ceaseless parade of empty train cars rolling headlong toward the Powder River Basin to be refreshed with coal. The train tracks they glided along were immaculately well - maintained, and why shouldn't they be? Their precious cargo was the lifeblood of civilization. The empty train cars were returning from the nodes of civilization, like spent red blood cells, to this giant, unyielding pump of geological energy in the prairie. The train cars heading out of the basin, freshly topped off with jet black mounds of fossil jungles from the Paleocene. They were shuttled along the infrastructural aorta before branching into capillaries where they'd deliver their carbon to far off power plants to be metabolized near cities, by metropolitan mitochondria. The trains pulled in and out of the Powder River Basin all day and all night, every day, every year without interruption. Finally, after taking some wrong dirt roads and being rebuffed by surly coal mine security workers —and even scarier signs ( "ORANGE CLOUD POSSIBLE AVOID CONTACT ") —we found an overlook into the manmade chasms. As you've probably heard about large industrial mining operations, encountering their inhuman scale in person is stupefying. It's the biggest thing you've ever seen happen. The walls of these manmade canyons were shaded mostly in dull grays and browns, but hundreds of feet down at the very bottom was a 25- foot -tall stripe of pure black that wrapped around the entire pit. Here a tiny earthmover came face -to -face with the planet's history and dug in. It pulled out forests from 60 million years ago, when atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher and Wyoming was a lush swampy Eden haunted by crocodiles. The little toy trucks shuffled this trapped sunlight, stored in the earth, up the sides of the pit wall to be delivered to the far corners of the world and burned. After visiting ancient fossil reefs and lifeless rock exposures, this might have been my best view of what was happening at the end of the Permian. As far as we can tell, we're shooting carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere ten times faster than the ancient volcanoes of Russia did during the end - Permian mass extinction, an episode that almost ended the project of complex life on Earth. Our planet is once again at a crossroads, and the tangled path to redemption is still very much open. But we now find ourselves falling towards the first steps down an older, much darker road. "What we're doing is the equivalent of that supervolcano going through Siberia," Knapp said, overlooking the pit. "By stripping out all of the coal from everywhere it exists on Earth and burning it. And we're doing it really, really fast. So we have an analog in Earth's history. And it's fucking scary." Related Video