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(dramatic music)

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(dramatic music)

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How quickly can life recover

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after a global catastrophe?

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Answers may lie in the fossil record

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at the top of the world.

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Scientists are looking at

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the world's biggest extinction event

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for clues about which species survived.

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It's a huge endeavor.

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When we get down this deep,

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we get down to the permafrost,

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and if you do the calculations,

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this is somewhere between 60 and 70 tons

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that was dug out by hand in two days.

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I think we can do it.

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Yeah, we could.

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We could do it.

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So I have a lot of really, really, good volunteers,

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students, and other scientists with me

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to do this kind of huge dig in a few days.

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Dr. Jorn Hurum is a paleontologist

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at the University of Oslo in Norway.

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He's pioneering an investigation

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into what species survived and emerged

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after the largest mass extinction on our planet.

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When we're talking about an extinction in paleontology,

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it means total extinction,

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and it almost wiped the whole blackboard completely.

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It happened 252 million years ago.

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It was not only a region of disaster,

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but it was really the biggest disaster in Earth's history,

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and of course there were life on land,

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there were life in the ocean at that time,

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and most of it got extinct.

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Before it happened,

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Permian Earth was a rich and diverse place.

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Land masses had merged into the super-continent of Pangaea,

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and the surrounding Panthalassic Ocean

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was teeming with life.

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(dramatic music)

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It's a beautiful environment.

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It's warm waters.

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You can see reefs, fish, bryozoans, you see trilobites.

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You see ammonites swimming around.

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It's a beautiful, complete ecosystem and, okay,

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the species would be different

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but they will feel all the niches

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in an ecosystem that will be comparable

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to like the Great Barrier Reef today.

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So it's a very, very evolved environment

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with lots of diversity.

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Early amphibians were ruthless hunters.

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There was a lot of amphibians at the end of the Permian.

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They were large and many of them looked like

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really big salamanders.

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But some of them had the more pointy heads.

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Some of them had round heads

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and they could be up to several meters long,

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so they were top predators in the environment.

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(dramatic music)

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The Permian was a predator's paradise

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farther inland, too.

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(roaring)

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They are end-of-the-Permian,

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mammal-like reptiles on land.

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They are synapsid reptiles.

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(roaring)

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They turn really big, like rhino size

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and some people, when you look at them,

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you say, okay, this is a dinosaur thing,

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but it's not, it's really mammal-like reptiles

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that live on land, in this big continent, Pangaea.

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Every day was competitive and dangerous.

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Then, without warning, a catastrophe

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unlike anything our planet had ever experienced before.

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Several miles beneath Earth's crust,

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a shifting, simmering violence finally exploded.

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About 252 million years ago,

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on the border between what we call the Permian

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and the Triassic time periods,

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the biggest volcanic eruptions in Earth's history happened

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and an area was covered in Siberia

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that was between the size of India and Australia.

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And not only it was this big, but it was also thick.

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The thickness of this volcanic eruption,

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all the things that came up with the volcanoes

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was about 2,000 meters, if we average it.

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That's over one mile thick.

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Molten lava continued to spew for several million years.

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But it wasn't just the inferno that was deadly.

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The volcanics came in contact with evaporates.

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There had been a large sea in the area

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that completely dried out, like the Dead Sea today.

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So you had big salt layers.

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And, of course, if you boil salt,

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you get a lot of nasty things

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because salt has a lot of chloride

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and when you start to boil chloride, you get a gas

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that's really poisonous and there's always some sulfur

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and if you start to boil the sulfur stuff,

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you get poisons and you get acids.

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Sulfuric acid.

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Everything on land and in the sea was affected.

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Suddenly, we see in the rock layers mud.

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Just dark, gray mud.

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And we can start to dig in it

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and we can see that there's almost no life.

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It's just covered with dead mud.

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(dramatic music)

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The dramatic end of the Permian

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is known as the Great Dying.

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And the oceans suffered the most.

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If you're on the conservative side,

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you say that 82% of all species in the ocean got extinct.

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If you're on the more sensational part of the statistics,

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you go for 96%.

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But something between 82% and 96% of all species

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in the ocean everywhere got extinct.

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Even hardy, iconic species,

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like trilobites vanished forever.

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The disaster was so nearly complete

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that in most places it would take 10 million years

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for life to recover.

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The period that begins just after the Permian extinction,

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252 million years ago, is known as the Mesozoic Era.

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Through some wonderful work done by Chinese

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and English paleontologists for many years,

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they see that life slowly appears again,

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but the complex ecosystems that you see

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for the rest of the Mesozoic,

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they only appear after 10 million years.

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But Jorn's team

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has made a surprising breakthrough

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by digging into the same geologic period

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on the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

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Svalbard is a great laboratory for

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trying to understand the recovery

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after this biggest extinction of them all

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because you have the layers in the mountainsides

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and you have no green, horrible stuff covering it.

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You have no recent plants,

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you have just these beautiful hillsides

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that are blown completely clean every winter

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and we have six weeks every summer to go there

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and you can go layer by layer by layer up the mountains.

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Life here recovered twice as fast.

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The uppermost layers are the bone bed.

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There's a large concretion here so

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I'm trying to remove the bone bed from around it.

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We have not published all of this yet,

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but really, slowly, it appears to us

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that we have quite a different time frame for the recovery.

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We are down to at least half the time.

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For the scientists, this was a revelation.

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So, in China, 10 million years,

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in Svalbard, five million years

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to a full ecosystem with top predators.

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We are trying now to push it down to four million years

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after the extinction, so then it's six million year gap

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between a large ecosystem close to the equator

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and one on the northern end of the Pangaea.

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In Svalbard, we see that things are moving

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much faster back to a recovery.

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The scientists don't yet know

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why this is the case,

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but they're determined to solve the mystery.

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Seeing numerous individuals of the same species

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is an important piece of the puzzle.

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So we start to see all the disaster taxa as well.

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Species that quickly appear

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in the fossil record after an extinction event

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are called disaster taxa.

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One tough, ray-finned fish is found worldwide.

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A global survivor of mass extinction.

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Over three feet long.

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We don't know why or how it survived the catastrophe.

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And they spread around the world, they are quite common.

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Especially one fish called saurichthys

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and it's found almost everywhere after this extinction.

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It looks like a gar with a very long beak.

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It's found in Madagascar, in China, in Italy,

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and on Svalbard, on Greenland.

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Quite recent after the extinction.

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Other creatures seen in Svalbard's

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earliest Triassic layers are more of a surprise.

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We see the disaster taxa and the marine amphibians.

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Amphibians were the prominent players

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in the Arctic ecosystem's earliest recovery.

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These marine amphibians,

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many of them looked like gharials.

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They had long, slender snouts.

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But they were more like a salamander body.

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So they were swimming with their tail, had small feet.

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Others had the shape of a skull more like an alligator.

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I don't think you would want to meet them any time.

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They will be like sea-living crocodiles,

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a little bit smaller but still very fierce,

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very aggressive, biting you.

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The new world was a hostile and bleak place.

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But amphibians liked it.

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If you can see the whole thing here,

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this here is probably a jaw.

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It's one of the largest things we have found here.

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This fossil jaw and many other fossils found

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may reveal why amphibians moved into the ocean

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and conceded the land to reptiles.

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This was once at the bottom of the Triassic ocean.

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They having their best days in this embayment

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that is the ocean bottom that's going to be Svalbard later.

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(sinister music)

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These disaster survivors

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adapted to the new unfriendly environment.

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But amphibians didn't rule

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early Triassic seas for very long.

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Thing quickly turned competitive.

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This is just the beginning of it and we see this exchange,

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the marine amphibians, there's fewer and fewer of them

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in different layers, and then they disappear.

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They thrived just after the extinction

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but they couldn't compete with something

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that was much faster, much better jaws, much bigger teeth.

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Within a few million years,

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reptiles also left land and quickly became

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the dominant predators in the sea.

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Jorn and his team are the first to document

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this transition in Northern Pangaea,

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five million years earlier than researchers thought.

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It's extremely fast evolution.

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We see the disaster taxa.

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We still the bony fishes.

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Then we see the marine amphibians.

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But then, we also have the first marine reptiles

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in the same layer and this is something

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that's quite spectacular for us to see that,

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actually, we have the mix.

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We have the change.

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This is when we go from an environment

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that's just extremely strange

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because it's just after the big extinction

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into something that starts to hint towards

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a normal, Mesozoic ecosystem.

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Determining what species

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can survive an extinction event

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and how long it takes for ecosystems to develop

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is important research for our future.

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I've not seeing anything like this before.

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Here, we've got our first break.

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Four to five million years

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is barely a blip on the timeline of Earth history.

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But in Svalbard, during that time,

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life accelerated from near zero to the fast lane.

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This unique window to the past helps Jorn and his team

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to decipher evolution's bigger picture.

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We have these five huge extinctions in life's history

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and we call them bottlenecks

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because there's just a few survivors

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and, of course, that gives the possibility

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for completely different groups

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to thrive after an extinction.

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Like the most famous one is when the dinosaurs go

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and then we are here because of the dinosaurs going extinct.

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It took quite a long time, but we are here now.

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These big extinctions that wipe out so much of life,

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they give different groups a possibility

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to evolve into these niches that was occupied before.

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It'll take years to clean

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and prepare all the bones they've found.

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But they have the evidence

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of this surprising, rapid recovery.

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And their investigation continues.

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The Great Dying was also associated

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with significant global warming.

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As today's world grows increasingly warmer,

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will creatures that we take for granted disappear?

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And that's quite interesting to think about.

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So it's hard to say what

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steers things through this extinction.

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I think it's a lot about luck.

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(light music)