At Lake Nyos, once these bubbles started to form they wanted to rise to the top, this brought up more carbon dioxide-rich water which then also started to develop bubbles, and pretty soon there was a big rush of carbon dioxide bubbles to the surface.

Once all this carbon dioxide reached the surface, it splashed some lake water out of the lake, like a big bubble bursting.

Ryskin writes in Geology: “Focusing on the Permian-Triassic (P/T) boundary, ca.

251 Ma, I explore the possibility that mass extinction can be caused by an extremely fast, explosive release of dissolved methane (and other dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide) that accumulated in the oceanic water masses prone to stagnation and anoxia (e.g., in silled basins).” Such events have climatic effects.

This scenario accounts well for the available data, and may be relevant to other phenomena.” Studying biological catastrophes like the P/T extinction can help astrobiologists understand the close connection between life, geology, chemistry – and how such events may disrupt this sometimes delicate relationship.

Redundant Evolution Great Impact: Part I Impact Hazards Website NASA/JPL Near Earth Object Program Do We Know What Killed the Dinosaurs?

The huge conflagrations plus flooding and overturned oceans would cause the extinctions.

Many paleontologists have been skeptical of the theory that an asteroid caused the extinction, since early studies of the fossil record suggested that the die-out happened gradually over millions of years — not suddenly like a single, catastrophic event.

Although no longer erupting, there is still gas being released by the old plumbing system under the lake.

“The mechanism of the explosive release,” continues Ryskin, “is the same as in the Lake Nyos disaster of 1986, i.e., a water-column eruption caused by the interplay of buoyancy forces and exsolution of dissolved gas.

In an article published in the September issue of Geology, Gregory Ryskin, associate professor of chemical engineering at Northwestern, suggests that huge combustible clouds produced by methane gas trapped in stagnant bodies of water and suddenly released could have killed off the majority of marine life and land animals and plants at the end of the Permian era — long before dinosaurs lived and died.

The mechanism also might explain other extinctions and climate perturbations (ice ages) and even the Biblical flood, as well as be the cause of future catastrophes.