Europe lived through a true "hell" of forest fires 201 million years ago, during the mass extinction that ended the Triassic period. This is the conclusion of a study led by Utrecht University and published this Tuesday in Nature Geoscience, which links these persistent fires to an episode of extreme global warming caused by intense volcanism associated with the fragmentation of the supercontinent Pangea. According to the researchers, the fires were not only a consequence of this climate change, but also contributed to accelerating the collapse of terrestrial ecosystems.