The Day The Earth Nearly Died

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

00:11:58 But that would have been just the beginning

00:13:26 He knew that to do so much damage the change in world temperatures would have had to have been rapid and dramatic

00:14:39 but he could also see there was no evidence that such an increase would wipe out 95% of all life

00:16:33 One of the things we'd like to know about the Permian mass extinction was how rapid it was

00:18:10 and fed them into a laptop

00:20:22 much faster than the climate changes caused by a flood basalt eruption

00:21:56 A meteor the size of Manhattan had wiped out most of life on earth

00:23:21 So under normal circumstance there would be a large shallow crater

00:25:06 It meant the Permian crater would have entirely filled with lava

00:26:48 The team spent weeks exploring the Permian rocks

00:28:36 As Retallack looked further at the new evidence there was a surprise

00:29:47 It didn't add up

00:31:30 they dropped us in the middle of nowhere and left us there for several weeks

00:32:57 Yeah. come ... Yeah

00:34:46 Many so small they had to be extracted in an acid bath

00:36:00 This was the first phase

00:38:03 Wignall realized that here was a fresh piece of evidence, something that, if he could understand it might provide the key to the Permian riddle

00:39:31 It's a gas frozen in huge reservoirs just below the seabed

00:41:24 The experiment supported what he'd suspected

00:43:25 and these certainly suggest that there may have been sufficient methane going into the atmosphere to perhaps increase global temperatures by 4/5 ¡ãC

00:45:11 There would have been a freezing winter

00:46:55 The cause of the Permian mass extinction may finally have been found

100:00:00 for life on earth to begin to recover