Tremor & Tide

Series A · Earth Before Us · Ep. 03 · 16:19 · 22 Nov 2026

What Caused the Permian Extinction? It Wasn't the Lava

Thumbnail · AI reconstruction

Premieres SUN 22 NOV · 10:00 CDMX

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Chapters

  1. 0:00 The Great Dying
  2. 0:53 Earth at the End of the Permian Period
  3. 2:16 How Fast Was the Great Dying?
  4. 4:02 Was It an Asteroid?
  5. 4:55 The Siberian Traps
  6. 6:28 The Lava Erupted Too Early
  7. 7:53 What Killed Life in the Permian Ocean
  8. 9:37 What the Magma Cooked Underground
  9. 11:40 Lystrosaurus and the Survivors
  10. 13:30 How Long Life Took to Recover
  11. 14:33 What We Still Don't Know

Sources & credits

Sources

  1. 01
    Burgess, Muirhead & Bowring, Nature Communications, 2017
  2. 02
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05
  6. 06
  7. 07
  8. 08
    Stanley, PNAS, 2016
  9. 09
  10. 10
  11. 11
    Botha, PeerJ, 2020
  12. 12

Footage and images

Satellite images: NASA Worldview (HLS, Landsat 8/9 data from USGS/NASA) and NASA Earth Observatory (Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response). Modern analogues: U.S. Geological Survey (photo: Liz Westby; Kilauea 2018 video: Hawaiian Volcano Observatory). Bulla section photo: Kustatscher et al. 2026, Geological Field Trips and Maps, CC BY 4.0, cropped. Lystrosaurus bone: Botha 2020, PeerJ, CC BY 4.0. Thrinaxodon 3D model: Smithsonian Institution (CC0). Maps: coastlines from Kocsis & Scotese 2023, PaleoCoastlines (PALEOMAP plate model), CC BY 4.0; present-day lines from Natural Earth. CC BY 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Some scenes are AI reconstructions or AI illustrations and are labelled on screen. Diagrams are redrawn and simplified. Original music.

Thumbnail: AI reconstruction. Made for Tremor & Tide (Nexlev Thumbnail Lab, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst).

AI & archive disclosure

This episode mixes real archive (always labeled) with AI reconstructions and simulations (always labeled). No AI image is presented as a photograph of a real event.

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