extinction of the unique Glossopteris flora and its associated herbivores, followed by the carnivorous guild. In the North China Basin, highly arid climatic conditions are recorded during the latest Permian, near the Permian-Triassic boundary, with a swing towards increased precipitation during the Early Triassic, the latter likely assisting biotic recovery following the mass extinction. Evidence from the Sydney Basin of eastern Australia, on the other hand, suggests that the expansion of semi-arid and arid climatic belts across Pangaea was not immediate but was instead a gradual, prolonged process. Apart from the disappearance of peatlands, there was little evidence of significant sedimentological changes in depositional style across the Permian-Triassic boundary. Instead, a modest shift to amplified seasonality and hotter summers is suggested by palaeoclimatological models based on weathering proxies from the region's Late Permian and Early Triassic deposits. In the Kuznetsk Basin of southwestern Siberia, an increase in aridity led to the demise of the humid-adapted cordaites forests in the region a few hundred thousand years before the Permian-Triassic boundary. This has been attributed to a broader poleward shift of drier, more arid climates during the late Changhsingian before the more abrupt main phase of the extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary that disproportionately affected tropical and subtropical species. Asteroid impact Evidence that an impact event may have caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction has led to speculation that similar impacts may have been the cause of other extinction events, including the P–Tr extinction, and thus to a search for evidence of impacts at the times of other extinctions, such as large impact craters of the appropriate age. Reported evidence for an impact event from the P–Tr boundary level includes rare grains of shocked quartz in Australia and Antarctica; fullerenes trapping extraterrestrial noble gases; meteorite fragments in Antarctica; and grains rich in iron, nickel, and silicon, which may have been created by an impact. However, the accuracy of most of these claims has been challenged. For example, quartz from Graphite Peak in Antarctica, once considered "shocked", has been re-examined by optical and transmission electron microscopy. The observed features were concluded to be due not to shock, but rather to plastic deformation, consistent with formation in a tectonic environment such as volcanism. An impact crater on the seafloor would be evidence of a possible cause of the P–Tr extinction, but such a crater would by now have disappeared. As 70% of the Earth's surface is