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Terrazzo hints for Monday, October 19, 2026
Mosaic № 73. Three hints, from a gentle nudge to the full answer. Open only as many as you need.
Hint 1: what kind of picture is it?
Today's subject comes from science.
The caption reads: “Ninety percent of everything, gone in a geological instant.”
Hint 2: the Laws, in plain words
You place 7 stones into a frame of 33 cells. Every cell is filled exactly once.
- Kinship. Same-coloured stones that touch make a region. Today: gold forms one region of 14; lapis blue forms 2 separate regions of 6, 2; moss green forms 3 separate regions of 5, 4, 1; terracotta forms one region of 1.
Start with the largest region the Laws name: it has the fewest ways to fit.
The answer: what the mosaic shows
The Great Dying
About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, roughly ninety-six percent of marine species and seventy percent of land vertebrates disappeared — the closest life has come to ending. The trigger appears to be the Siberian Traps, a volcanic province that erupted through coal beds for perhaps two million years, pumping out carbon dioxide, methane and sulphur. Oceans warmed, acidified and lost their oxygen. Recovery took ten million years, far longer than after the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs. It is the one extinction where the mechanism — rapid carbon release into the atmosphere — is uncomfortably familiar.