Scientists have speculated for years that the Siberian Traps, a featured formed by a massive volcanic event 250 million years ago, may have been involved in the Permian extinction, but nobody's worked out exactly how. Now a group of scientists are proposing exactly that. Having the lava pass through salt-rich rock, and thereby creating a much more poisonous event, would neatly explain why this eruption was so disruptive when other similar events, like the one which formed the Deccan Traps area, were not.