Then Siberia opened.
Not all at once—the way
A wound opens is slowly, the first
Fissure finding the surface on a day
Like any other—the initial burst
Of basalt thin and local, then another,
And another, until the cracks become
A thousand miles of venting, a mother
Of all volcanic fields, the sum
Of eruption beyond any scale
The world had seen in living memory—
Two million cubic miles of basalt's trail
Of fire written on the Siberian territory
In layers and in years, not hours—
This was no single blast but an age
Of burning, stretching over a hundred thousand years' powers
Of sustained eruption—stage
By stage the gases filled the sky:
The carbon dioxide first, the warming
Before the cooling—and then the cry
Of sulfur dioxide, the storming
Of the atmosphere with acid—every cloud
That formed above the Permian land
Came down as acid rain, a shroud
Of chemical death across the strand
Of every forest that remained—the trees
Burned where they stood, not from fire
But from the rain itself, the acid's ease
Of stripping chlorophyll from the entire
Canopy—the gymnosperm forests
That Conifera had built on every ridge
And hillside went brown first,
Then gray, then fell—the bridge
Between the sun and life was broken here:
The photosynthesis could not proceed
In acid air—the base of the world's career
Of energy was failing—every creed
Of eating built on plant was now
Built on nothing.
The ocean was not spared—
The carbon dioxide took its bow
Of dissolution into the wide shared
And global sea: carbonic acid formed
From CO₂ and water—ocean
Chemistry was stormed
And pH fell—the oceanic
Shells of carbonate dissolved—the coral
Buildings of three hundred million years
Went soft and then to nothing—the oral
Architecture of the reef appears
Dissolving—the sea turned warm and anoxic
In its depths, where oxygen was gone
And hydrogen sulfide—the toxic
Purple gas of the deep-water zone—
Rose to the surface in great blooms
Of killing: purple water at the shore
Where nothing lived, the ocean's tombs
Of former life, the sea's own door
Shut closed—96 percent of every
Marine species would not cross
The boundary into the next century—
The coral, the brachiopod, the loss
Of the rugose coral entire,
The trilobite—already old
And few—would meet the fire
Of the last extinction, cold
And permanent—the trilobite whose line
Stretched back to the Cambrian explosion's
Dawn, who had survived every sign
Of mass death in the ocean's
Long history, met its end here:
Not with a bang but with the slow
Acidification, year by year,
Of every sea it swam below.
On land: the acid rain, the heat,
The collapse of the food web's base—
Dicyno's herds could find no meat
Of plant to eat, and so the race
To starvation ran from herbivore
To carnivore—Gorgo starved
When Dicyno starved—the floor
Of the food pyramid was carved
Away, and everything above it fell.
Seventy percent of land vertebrates
Would not survive—the gorgonopsid's knell
Was final, absolute—the gates
Closed on her line entirely,
No survivors of her ancient house
In any form—the saber-toothed
And racing hunter, proud and fierce,
Was taken—not by any rival's tooth
But by the failure of the food—
And the Permian age went down in truth
To the last word that all life understood:
That the world can end not with a war
Between the creatures but with the end
Of what the creatures need—the door
Of photosynthesis, the friend
Of all that breathes.
This is Good Permian Friday:
The death of the Paleozoic world—
Not villainy, not error, not the wrong way
Chosen—only the deep-buried, curled
And patient force of geological time
Expressing what it must—the volcano
Did not choose to kill, the sublime
And ancient earth merely let go
Of what had built within it—and the cost
Was paid by every living thing above
That ground—the world was lost
And remade, the way that love
Itself must sometimes die to be reborn.