Informative from a geological standpoint, especially about some features in West Texas I did not know about.
But the video kind of soft peddles the extremity of the End Permian Extinction, and our role in recreating those conditions today.
More here from my decade old video, including an interview with permian expert Lee Kump, who draws the parallel more clearly.
We are the asteroid this time.
When taking the “soft rock” geology classes at UT after I retired, we were focused on the identification of classes of fossils and the nature of the rocks (river deposits, wave-beaten shores, coral reefs) that they marked. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me some time before I realized that the research to understand the age, porosity, and coastline progression/regression was primarily driven by the oil and gas industry’s need to discover profitable oil fields, even if the scientists themselves were just nerds enjoying the knowledge.
Eventually in the advanced classes they started speaking in terms of “source rock” (typically lithified organic carbon rich marshland that been pressure-cooked over time) vs. “reservoir rock” (like very porous old reef rock that would capture the migrating crude oil and gas). Summer trips to the Guadalupe “Mountains” were for students to understand the equivalent structure of long-buried reefs that acted as oil and gas reservoirs.
[Fortunately, a lot of the porous discoveries were relevant to hydrogeologists, too, and I hung out with a lot of older classmates in that discipline.]
Thanks for sharing that interesting insight into the turbulent Permian period, and long may PBS continue and survive the present administration.
Later on in our Earths history, concerning research reported in the AGU’s EOS:-
“The extended recovery time during the PETM likely means that future climate change scenarios will influence the carbon cycle for longer than most carbon cycle models predict, according to the researchers. ”
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/an-ancient-warming-event-may-have-lasted-longer-than-we-thought .
Further Dr James E. Hansen’s release of a recent paper, “Global warming has accelerated: are
the public and the United Nations well informed?
“A few reports appeared in the media the next day,
but, almost uniformly, these reports dismissed our conclusions as a fringe opinion, out of step with the
larger scientific community, and thus there was no continuing discussion of the issues raised in our
paper.”
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2025/CloudFeedback.13May2025.pdf