It has been recently revealed that only asteroid impact was not responsible for causing extension of dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.
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A massive asteroid strike 66 million years ago triggered a string of potent volcanic eruptions that spelled doom for the dinosaurs, U.S. researchers said Thursday. But new research suggests there was another layer to the cataclysm: The asteroid hit the earth so hard that it spurred a massive volcanic eruption on the Indian subcontinent that helped eradicate other dinosaurs who might have survived as well killing 70 percent of the Earth’s entire species.
Professor Paul Renne, of University of California, Berkeley, the lead author of the study stated that based on the dating of lavas, it is pretty certain that the impact and volcanism occurred inside 50,000 years of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Fifty-thousand years apart may sound like it’s pushing the boundary of claiming two things happened at the same time, but that’s not the case with geologic time. The eruptions started lasting longer and sent out more and more ash, dust, and toxic fumes into the atmosphere. Over the course of 420,000 years following the asteroid, they concluded, the Deccan eruptions produced enough lava to cover the continental USA with a molten, 600-ft-deep (183 m) ocean.
“We are showing the viability of a scenario in which the impact and accelerated volcanism – which would be especially potent – are genetically related”. Geologists analyzed the volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in western India.
The impact of the object, known at the Chicxulub impact, created magnitude 11 earthquakes near the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, scientists say. There, they examined different levels of volcanic rock, from the ancient ones to the new ones. That would then suggest causality and not random coincidence: The object from space could have boosted the rate of lava flows. The analysis demonstrate major changes in the Deccan Traps volcanism, which was probably bubbling along happily, continuously and relatively slowly before the extinction. And ultimately, it’s impossible to determine if volcanoes or the asteroid impact caused the extinction, he says.
But assigning blame between Chicxulub and the Deccan traps has been hard without precise dates of the lava flows in India relative to the timing of the asteroid impact. He speculates that its effects rippled along the boundaries of nearby tectonic plates until they reached the volcanoes, expanding the size of subterranean magma chambers and thus increasing the volume of magma they could spew during any given eruption.
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Other co-authors of the paper are graduate student Courtney Sprain and volcanologist Steve Self of UC Berkeley; Loÿc Vanderkluysen of the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science at Drexel University in Philadelphia; and Kanchan Pande of the Department of Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai. It means that both the asteroid and the supervolcanoes most likely led to a huge global climate disturbance that killed off not just the dinosaurs but many other forms of terrestrial and marine life, scientists said.
