Volcanoes, Microbes and Climate Change: What cause the Permian Extinction?

I did a post recently on how the observation that volcanic activity led to greater salmon runs, prompted an experiment that worked fabulously.

Evolution stalled for about a billion years and it may have been changes in climate (and a cooling mantle) that caused evolution to jump start.  Climate change has played a roll in the evolution of ice age species.  Human evolution may have been driven by climate change.

Lystrosaurus, a relative to mammals, was one of a handful of “disaster taxa” to escape from the rubble of the Permian Period, along with the meter-high spore-tree Pleuromeia.

But this article notes that with the Permian Extinction, the triggering event may have been volcanos in Siberia that increased nickel levels in the oceans.  Methane producing microbes, taking advantage of nutrients in the oceans, exploded in populations, acidifying the oceans ,and changing the climate dramatically. Ninety percent of species went extinct.