This is CBSI on the World. I'm John Bachelor, Hotel Mars, episode and David Livingston, my colleague and co-host and co-host and co-pilot, and rather than go into the depths of the solar system, we're going into time, the great dying of 250 million years ago, and we're very pleased

to welcome Alexander Farnsworth, who is a co-author in a new study identifying

drivers for the great dying at the end of the Permian age and the beginning of a re-awakening of nature.

This is a time when there were dinosaurs, not the ones that are famous like T-Rex and Brontosaurus,

smaller versions. There was rich sea life. And then along

came this great extinction that wiped out a huge percentage, first of the land animals,

the terrestrial land, and then of the sea

creatures. This was a time when the continents were all one, Pangea, and there were

two seas, one called Teethys, the other one called Pentelosic.

And these two seas had all the, all the creatures you won,

and then they disappeared.

And the land had all the creatures you want, then they disappeared and the land had all the

creatures you want and it disappeared. What drove that? Heretofore, before

Alex and his colleagues took this question on the assumption was oh well there

were volcanoes and that poisoned the air and that led to the great dying There were problems with that explanation so we're now

going to explore. Alex a very good evening to you. Congratulations this is

wonderful to go to the Permian. I want to begin, however, by saying you do climate modeling, which is how

this case was made. What does that mean climate modeling? Good evening to you.

Yes, good evening. Thanks for having one your show, John. Yeah, so I'm a

paleo climate modeler. And you know in very many senses is very similar to

the sort of weather and climate modeling that we, you know,

when you wake up in the morning and you're looking for that weather forecast and you want to know

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