The dozen different sources from the period say something very strange. They say basically that the sun disappeared.

Witness a world where nature reigns supreme and catastrophe rewrote the story of civilization.

Huge volcanic bombs are coming out of the sky, these great rocks about three feet across,

crashing through the material.

In the ancient world, disaster was always lurking.

Earthquakes and volcanoes flattened and buried mighty cities in an instant.

Drought and plague wiped out civilizations without mercy.

So if you've got an empire, that too becomes immensely vulnerable and prone to collapse.

Life in the ancient world often hung by a thread.

Over the next four episodes, we'll discover that survival was never guaranteed.

It's like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the six holes.

It's time to step into the chaos and witness the catastrophe,

to uncover how disaster reshaped civilizations and the world itself.

This is great disasters.

It was the biggest mass extinction event in Earth's history.

250 million years ago, a rich and diverse prehistoric world on land and sea was wiped out.

97% of life on the planet was extinguished.

It's called the Great Dying for a reason.

This was the Permian extinction.

In this episode, we're going to explore what we know about this most catastrophic of all extinctions.

We'll highlight the rich and diverse world that existed beforehand,

the many different bizarre species that lived on land and in the sea. We'll delve into the

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