Texas

Manual Tank Gauging

Texas

The Permian Basin

The Permian Basin, America’s largest producing oil field, takes its name from the geological period that ended in mass extinction. According to paleontologists like University of Washington, Seattle, professor Peter Ward, enormous volcanic eruptions in what’s now Siberia blasted carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, starting a chain reaction which would ultimately lower the world’s oxygen below levels needed to sustain life. The world’s ocean species began to die.But organisms that didn’t need oxygen thrived, theoretically using the sulfur dissolved in the water to survive. One such organism was green sulfur bacteria.

The waste product of such bacteria, hydrogen sulfide, is still there over 250 million years later. Only now, it’s underground, dissolved and mixed in with the remains of the species it destroyed.By the end of the Permian period, 95% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial life had been wiped out, including the insects. The catastrophe even destroyed parts of the earth’s ozone layer.