What happened during Earth's worst mass extinction?

Around 252 million years ago, life on Earth came closer to complete collapse than at any other known point in its history. This was the Permian-Triassic extinction — an event so severe that it became known as the Great Dying. Massive volcanic eruptions transformed the atmosphere. Temperatures rose. Oceans lost oxygen. Ecosystems failed, and entire groups of animals disappeared. On land and at sea, the world changed rapidly. Forests collapsed. Marine life was devastated. Food chains broke apart, and survival became increasingly difficult across much of the planet. By the time it was over, most species were gone. But life survived. This documentary explores the chain of events behind the greatest extinction in Earth’s history to ask: What happened during Earth’s worst mass extinction? FOOTAGE & VISUAL CREDITS Credits: ESO | NASA | ESA | ESA/Hubble | M. Kornmesser | Mahdi Zamani | J. Depasquale | L. Calçada | Mark Garlick | N. Bartmann | NAOJ | A. Pagan | A. Riess | ALMA | Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit | GROND | K. Sahu | NRAO | P. McGill | R. Indebetouw | SH0ES team | STScI | University of Warwick | A. Filippenko | A. Levan | A. Martin-Carrillo et al. | A. Nierenberg | A. Reines | A. Roquette | A. Simonnet | Alexandra Angelich | Anthony Meilland | B. Johnson | B. Robertson | BlackHoleCam | CSA | D. Eisenstein | D. Milisavljevic | Digitized Sky Survey 2 | ESO 2.2-metre telescope | F. Millour | F. Vogt et al. | Hubble Heritage Team | HUDF 2012 Team | J. Bally | J. Banovetz | J. Dalcanton | Jordy Davelaar et al. | K. Noll et al. | L. Wheatley | LIGO | M. Rieke | M.-R. Cioni | MPG | MUSE | NSF | NSF's NOIRLab | OmegaCAM | P. Das et al. | R. Ellis | R. Sankrit | Radboud University | S. Brunier | S. Goldman | S. Steinhöfel | S. Tacchella | Sonoma State University | T. Treu | VIMOS | VIRCAM | VISTA | VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey | VLT | VPHAS+ team | VST | W. D. Vacca | Z. Schutte | Zdeněk Bardon MUSIC CREDITS Music by Kevin MacLeod — incompetech.com Additional footage and imagery used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Some assets have been cropped, animated, reframed or captioned for this video. Additionally, public-domain material sourced from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.