volcanic effects on the climate during Pangaea?

Question

Which influence does the constellation of the continents have on the global climate? Was the biosphere more susceptible to climatic effects a volcanic eruption may cause during the Permian than it is today? We know that eruptions of volcanoes can influence the global climate and we know that during the Permian period the continents drifted together to a supercontinent extending from the South Pole along the meridian almost to the North Pole. At such a constellation of the land mass, it's imaginable that an eruption of a volcano may have triggered a chain of effects which caused a change of the global climate which was different than we could expect in our current environment. Are there any evidences from a palaeontological point of view that such a concentration of the land mass strengthened the rise of the global temperature (which probably killed many species) after the release of greenhouse gas a volcano might have caused?

Answer 1

Volcanism greatly influenced global climate in the late Permian Period, when Earth's landmasses were arranged in the supercontinent of Pangaea. The onset of volcanic eruptions across modern-day Siberia ejected enough lava to blanket a region the size of western Europe. As a result, ocean acidification and climatic warming extinguished over 90% of all animal species at that time.

Siberian flood basalts in western China and northeastern Siberia erupted 250 Myr ago, ejecting millions of cubic kilometers of basalt. These eruptions released massive amounts of volcanic ash into the air, darkening the atmosphere and thereby harming the efficiency of plants in their reuptake of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Rising magma, burning through coal seams, sent carbon dioxide and coal fly ash into the skies. These gases later mixed with atmospheric oxygen and lowered the levels of oceanic O2.