Fault Lines

On May 18, 1980, a magnitude-5.1 earthquake stripped the entire north face of Mount St. Helens in seconds, releasing the largest debris avalanche in recorded history. The episode asks whether the monitoring revolution that followed actually prepares us for the volcanic events capable of ending mass life on Earth. Ola and Amara move from the 4.2 cubic kilometers ejected at St. Helens up to the Siberian Traps' four million cubic kilometers of lava — the Large Igneous Province tied to the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago — then work through the gas chemistry cascade and sill-emplacement mechanism that made the eruption so lethal. They close by stress-testing modern monitoring tools against a threat that has no cone, no point source, and no seismic spike to detect. Listeners will come away with a clearer sense of where volcanology's hard limits actually are.

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, a biologically stable marine world built over fifty million years was erased in geological near-silence. This episode of Fault Lines examines the central question of the Permian-Triassic extinction: what actually killed 96% of marine species, and did anything that followed deserve to be called recovery? Ola and Amara walk through the Siberian Traps as the volcanic trigger, the cascading kill chain of thermal spikes, ocean anoxia, and acidification, and a January 2026 study in npj Biodiversity showing that Early Triassic ecosystems rebounded rapidly but remained structurally unstable. Listeners will come away understanding the critical difference between taxonomic recovery, measured in millions of years, and true ecological recovery, which may have taken fifty million years or more.