[Rockhounds] NEW STUDY: THE ASTEROID KILLED THE DINOSAURS, BUT VOLCANOES MADE THINGS… BETTER?

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

We know that a monster asteroid impact killed off the (non-avian) dinosaurs
at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Sixty-six million years ago, a
10-kilometer wide space rock slammed into the Earth just off the coast of
modern-day Yucatan, blasting a crater 150 kilometers wide and setting off a
chain of catastrophic climate events that wiped out 75% of all species on
the planet.

Over the past few years, though, evidence of another over-the-top disaster
happening at the same time has piled up: A huge volcanic eruption event in
India, creating what’s now called the Deccan Traps
<http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/oldroot/volcanoes/volc_images/europe_west_asia/india/deccan.html>.
This was not like a single volcano blowing its top; this was a series of
enormous eruptions lasting for *hundreds of thousands of years.* By the
time they subsided, 500,000 square kilometers over the area were buried 2
kilometers deep with igneous rock.

There’s now pretty good evidence that the Deccan eruptions were going on
for a while *before* the asteroid impact, and shortly after the eruption
volume increased *substantially*, likely due to the seismic waves from the
asteroid impact opening up the valves underground
<https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/did-the-dinosaur-killer-asteroid-have-an-accomplice-evidence-is%E2%80%A6-mounting>,
so to speak.

Because of the timing, some paleontologists suggested the two crises worked
together
<https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/more-evidence-dinosaurs-suffered-one-two-extinction-punch>,
giving the dinosaurs a one-two punch from which they couldn’t recover
<https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/what-killed-the-dinosaurs-astronomy-and-geology>
.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/asteroid-killed-dinosaurs-but-volcanoes-made-things-better