The rocks left behind by these ancient lava flows are known as the Siberian Traps. Today, the Traps produce spectacular river gorges and plateaux of black rock in the middle of Russia’s boreal nowhere. The eruptions that produced them, and that once covered Siberia in 2m square miles of steaming basalt, are in a rare class of behemoths called Large Igneous Provinces (Lips).
Lips are by far the most dangerous thing in the Earth’s history, with a track record far more catastrophic than asteroids. These once-an-epoch, planet-killing volcanoes are of a different species entirely than your garden-variety Tambora or Mount Rainier or Krakatau, or even Yellowstone. Imagine if Hawaii was created not over tens of millions of years and scattered across the Pacific, but in brief pulses in less than 1 million years, and all in one area (and sometimes emerging through the centres of continents). Lips are the Earth’s way of rudely reminding us that our thin rocky surface, and the gossamer glaze of green goo that coats it, sits atop a roiling, utterly indifferent planetary drama. It’s one in which titanic currents of rock draw down entire ocean plates to the centre of the world to be destroyed and reborn. When this process suffers a hiccup, Lips gush out of the crust like tectonic indigestion, leaving gigantic swaths of the Earth buried in volcanic rock. Depending on the pace and size of these eruptions, if they’re big enough and fast enough, they can destroy the world.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/19/a-climate-of-unparalleled-malevolence-are-we-on-our-way-to-the-sixth-major-mass-extinction
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