Life on Earth was nearly extinguished 251 million years ago. Some 96 per cent of marine species went extinct. The world's forests disappeared, and for about a million years no plant grew higher than a half a metre. It took 100 million years for biodiversity to return to pre-extinction levels. The global ecosystem was shattered and the history of our planet took an abrupt turn, laying the basis for the rise of dinosaurs, mammals and flowering plants. The cause of this catastrophe was a series of immense volcanic eruptions that produced the vast stepped layers of igneous rock known as the Siberian traps (the word "trap" comes from the Dutch for "stair"). This period of hellish volcanic activity spewed hundreds of thousands of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and covered huge areas of land with thousands of cubic kilometres of lava.
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