Study Finds Europe Burned for Thousands of Years During Warming 201 Million Years Ago

Q: A 'perfect storm' trapped the world in a fire cycle for 300,000 years. What finally broke it?

The best reading of the new research is that the fire cycle ended only when the underlying drivers eased: volcanic carbon emissions from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province waned, the climate and carbon cycle began to stabilize, and forests gradually recovered enough to replace the highly flammable fern-dominated landscapes. The study shows how the cycle sustained itself. Massive volcanism around 201 million years ago drove 5 to 10 degrees Celsius of warming, drought, and ecosystem collapse. Conifer forests gave way to fern savannahs, and those ferns acted as “disaster species”: they spread quickly after fire, then dried into dense fuel that made the next fire more likely. That feedback loop could keep burning landscapes trapped in repeated fire and regrowth for tens of thousands to as much as 300,000 years. What finally broke it was not a single event identified in the paper, such as a storm or sudden cooling pulse. The available evidence points instead to a gradual recovery during the earliest Jurassic, when the worst phase of CAMP-driven disruption passed. As carbon-cycle shocks weakened, conditions became less favorable for continent-scale fern-fueled burning, allowing more stable vegetation and tree cover to return. So the answer is that the “perfect storm” was broken by long-term environmental stabilization after the peak volcanic crisis, not by a clearly documented one-off trigger.

3 articles · Updated · Conway Daily Sun · Jul 22

New research says wildfires swept across Europe for thousands of years during an episode of extreme global warming about 201 million years ago.
The study places the prolonged burning in the end-Triassic period, linking repeated fires to a sharply hotter climate that disrupted forests across the region.
Researchers describe a landscape where disturbed soils and the remains of conifer forests were overtaken by pioneering ferns, signaling long-lasting ecological damage.
The findings add evidence that ancient warming episodes were accompanied by sustained environmental upheaval, not just short-lived temperature spikes.