There is a particular genre of internet content that presents itself as education, but behaves more like theatrical stand up comedy with better lighting. It usually arrives in your feed with dramatic music, slow zooms on stock volcanoes, and someone in immaculate make-up telling you that on Earth it once “rained for two million years straight” as if they were personally there with a clipboard and full camera crew.
The Carnian Pluvial Episode has become today’s episode in this series. However, it was not a planet-wide, non-stop, two-million-year monsoon where the sky simply gave up and forgot how to stop raining. That version belongs firmly in the category of Instagram science, where nuance goes to die somewhere between a transition effect, a ring light and some very tired dancing in non existent underwear.
In reality, it is a genuine and fascinating period in Earth’s history during the Late Triassic, roughly 234 to 232 million years ago. Scientists describe it as a long interval of significantly wetter global conditions, with increased rainfall, climate instability, and major environmental change. It is associated with ecological disruption and shifts in biodiversity, including conditions that helped reshape life on Earth.
The way these social media stories are packaged is always the same: take a real scientific event, remove all the inconvenient complexity, flatten regional variations, ignore timescales, and delete uncertainty. Then pour on a thick glaze of certainty, preferably spoken in a tone that suggests the narrator has personally interviewed a dinosaur.
By the time it reaches your feed, the Carnian Pluvial Episode is no longer a climate shift. It has become a cinematic disaster reel with rain rendered in ultra HD.
This is where things get slightly absurd. Because the actual science is already interesting enough. You do not need to inflate it into geological melodrama. A long period of increased rainfall and climatic upheaval that may have influenced evolution and extinction patterns is more than sufficient material for curiosity. But that does not always perform well in short-form video culture, where attention spans are measured in swipes rather than seconds.
So instead, we get the “ring light professor” phenomenon. The archetypal creator stands in front of a neutral background, delivers a tone of absolute certainty, and compresses complex Earth systems into a sentence that would make a sedimentologist quietly leave the room and go for a walk to wipe the nonscience from their memory.
The problem is not that people are engaging with science because generating curiosity in this subject is a good thing. The problem is that social media monetisers have become a substitute for accuracy. If you say something slowly enough, with enough facial symmetry and a vaguely concerned expression, it starts to feel true even when it is not fully grounded. Once you add dramatic phrasing like “the Earth drowned for two million years”, you are no longer doing science communication, but creating mythology with subtitles.
The Carnian Pluvial Episode itself does not need this treatment. It already tells a story of a planet undergoing major change, of ecosystems adapting under stress, and of climate systems shifting in ways that still matter to how we understand Earth history; it was a messy, uneven, and regionally varied period of life on Earth aka “real science”. The irony is that simplifying it too far actually makes it less impressive. A nuanced, evolving climate system operating over hundreds of thousands of years is far more interesting than a fictional global flood on loop.
But nuance does not always travel well through algorithmic delivery systems that survives on drama. As a result, many topics such as science get dressed up, overlit, and massaged, until it looks less like geology and more like a trailer for a disaster film that never got made.
There is nothing wrong with wanting science to be accessible. The issue begins when accessibility turns into distortion. Because once that happens enough times, people stop learning about the world as it is and start learning about the world as it performs on screen.
Earth, for all its volcanic eruptions and climate swings, does not perform on cue; it does not do clean narratives until the credits roll. It certainly does not do two million years of continuous rainfall just because it would look good in a reel.
It does something far more complicated than that, which is exactly why we need to get our facts from credible sources such as reputable documentaries, books and our teachers.
