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and keep listening to Shortwave. All right, on to the show. You're listening to Shortwave

from NPR. Hey Shortwavers, producer BurMcCoy guest hosting today with an episode about a mysterious mass extinction.

So 251.9 million years ago, there are these volcanoes that erupt and they pump all these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This is Kemi Ashingywa.

She's a paleo-physiology graduate student at Stanford University.

And this volcanic activity she's talking about wasn't just one or two eruptions.

It was on the scale of the whole continent in what is now the Siberian traps in Russia.

And as a result of this, there is global climate change.

Temperatures go up, oxygen in the ocean goes down.

Not everything dies, but almost everything dies.

This mass extinction, Earth's third, is known as the Great Dying, though the official name is the Permian Triassic or the

N-Permian mass extinction. The end-permian is the largest loss of animal diversity in Earth's history.

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