Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth - The Atlantic

This would be a great read even if it were just science fiction. Beautifully written, start to finish.

Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth - The Atlantic:

Unsurprisingly, there’s no life in these ghastly rocks (even most plant life checks out at temperatures not much more than 40 degrees Celsius), making them exceedingly difficult to date.

“There’s absolutely nothing to date in any of these rocks because everything’s dead,” says Knapp. “But what we can say is that this is definitely Permian.”

...

“I see [a few] possibilities. The first is that things just really got that crazy. Shit happened. The second is that we just really don’t understand positive feedback loops yet. That’s the scary option. The third is that you can’t do it without a supercontinent. We need to be studying these time periods when carbon dioxide caused problems, because right now we don’t understand them at all. It should be a national priority to study the Permian to figure out what the hell happened.”

...

At the top of the canyon the rocks gave up their Martian hue at long last, and were etched with the geological traces of tranquil lakes and river channels and even dinosaur footprints. Up in those rocks the Earth was finally recovering, and the reptiles of the Earth’s most storied age—the Mesozoic—were making their tentative claims to a world that they would come to rule for more than 100 million years. But down here along the dusty trail was the end of the Permian, and the planet was still fighting for its life.

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Their precious cargo was the lifeblood of civilization. The empty train cars were returning from the nodes of civilization, like spent red blood cells, to this giant, unyielding pump of geological energy in the prairie... They were shuttled along the infrastructural aorta before branching into capillaries where they’d deliver their carbon to far off power plants to be metabolized near cities, by metropolitan mitochondria.

The phrase "global weirding", referring to the strange signs in the fossil record leading up to the Permian extinction, recurs in the article. I can't help thinking that would make a great name for a science-explainer YouTube series...