Jennifer Welsh

A great explosive burning of coal set fire and made molten by lava bubbling from the Earth's mantle , looking akin to Kuwait's giant oil fires but lasting anywhere from centuries to millennia, could have been the cause of  the world's most-devastating mass extinction, new research suggests.
The event, called the Great Dying, occurred 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. "The Great Dying was the biggest of all the mass extinctions," said study researcher Darcy Ogden of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. "Estimates suggest up to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land species were lost."
Researchers still debate the cause of this mass-extinction event, implicating everything from asteroids to volcanic eruptions to a decrease of the oxygen in the atmosphere.