On February 25 between 16:00 and 19:00 there appeared to be a rupture of the major faultlines on the West Coast of the US. The gases CO, CO2 and SO2 were measured to skyrocket, stay very high (indicating ongoing emissions) for at least 18 hours and then slowly dissipate. The spatial pattern of the emissions followed the "tuning fork" pattern of the major faultlines.

Siberian Traps

The Siberian Traps form a large region of volcanic rock, known as a large igneous province, in Siberia, Russia. The massive eruptive event which formed the traps, one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth's geological history, continued for a million years and spanned the Permian–Triassic boundary, about 251 to 250 million years ago.

The term "traps" is derived from the Swedish word for stairs (trappa, or sometimes trapp), referring to the step-like hills forming the landscape of the region, which is typical of flood basalts.

Vast volumes of basaltic lava paved over a large expanse of primeval Siberia in a flood basalt event. Today the area covered is about 2 million km2—roughly equal to western Europe in land area—and estimates of the original coverage are as high as 7 million km2. The original volume of lava is estimated to range from 1 million to 4 million km3.