The Day The Earth Nearly Died

00:10:46 snow, unusual amounts of snow fell and actually the winter continued onto the next summer

00:12:04 As the sky's cleared vast quantities of gas given off by the burning lava

00:13:32 You have to have a very sudden, but very large increase in temperature

00:14:56 Well, scientist estimate that a rapid temperature rise of maybe 10 ¡ãC is going to be necessary to kill off so many animals and plants and everything else

00:16:44 He planed to use a radically new dating system

00:18:38 Rampino then fitted the layer of rock containing the evidence of the extinction into this pattern of cycles

00:20:41 and you end up with a catastrophic situation for life on the planet

00:22:13 The meteor that had wiped out the dinosaurs had left a giant fingerprint in the shape of a crater

00:23:47 an enormous amount of energy is released when the crater here is transforming back to its shallow shape

00:25:31 When a large meteor hits the earth it leaves more than one fingerprint

00:27:09 It's most frequently white and translucent

00:29:00 When a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago it left abundant evidence of itself

00:30:27 Paul Wignall, a geologist at the University of Leeds, had always been doubtful about the meteor theory

00:32:04 But finally they found what they had come for

00:33:47 We could see that the extinction wasn't occurring instantaneously, but in fact was spread over several

00:35:16 which were telling us in fantastic detail just what was going on at this time

00:36:40 Following on from that we then see the culmination of the land extinction

00:38:52 but one evening, sitting in a bar, he ran into a friend

00:40:28 and if it was, how did it get there?

00:42:35 story we're getting from Greenland. It's a kind of a missing link in the story for the Permian extinction

00:44:32 It started, as many had thought, with the Siberian Traps

00:46:11 This huge injection of greenhouse gas now pushed world temperatures up a further 5 ¡ãC

01:09:09 and flew out there