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.