An international team, led by Curtin University, has has shown that some ancient periods of massive eruptions released green house gases so quickly that they caused rapid climate change and mass extinctions.

"We have carefully dated minerals contained in the volcanic rocks and shown that only the fastest sequences of eruptions caused significant species extinctions," team leader Fred Jourdan said.

"To understand the long-term climatic and biological effects of the massive injections of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere by modern society we have to understand how climate was affected in the past," he added.

For years, a controversy has raged about whether mass extinctions over the last 550 million years were caused by the impact of giant asteroids or by huge volcanic eruptions.