The Emeishan Traps
Flood basalts erupt across south-west China and poison the shallow seas around them.
- When
- Known to
- ± 3 million years
- Era
- Permian, Paleozoic
The Emeishan large igneous province erupts around 260 million years ago in what is now Sichuan and Yunnan, covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometres in lava. Mercury anomalies in contemporaneous sediments record the volcanic loading of the atmosphere, and marine anoxia spreads through the region. It is the trigger of the Capitanian extinction, and a rehearsal for what happens eight million years later.