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Extreme Global Warming May Have Caused Largest Extinction Ever
Feverishly hot ocean surface waters potentially reaching more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) may have helped cause the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history, researchers say.
“We may have found the hottest time the world has ever had,” researcher Paul Wignall, a geologist at the University of Leeds in England, told LiveScience.
The mass extinction at the end of the Permian Era about 250 million years ago was the greatest die-off in Earth’s history. The cataclysm killed as much as 95 percent of the planet’s species. One key factor behind this disaster was probably catastrophic volcanic activity in what is now Siberia that spewed out as much as 2.7 million square miles (7 million square kilometers) of lava, an area nearly as large as Australia. These eruptions might have released gases that damaged Earth’s protective ozone layer.
Read more here at: http://www.livescience.com/24091-extreme-global-warming-mass-extinction.html
