That Giant Asteroid Wasn’t the Only Thing That Killed the Dinosaurs
The impact idea gained wide acceptance, but some details remained stubbornly difficult to explain with a single catastrophic event. Another idea that started gaining traction was that a series of huge and sustained volcanic eruptions occurred for a couple of hundred thousand years before the impact. These were no ordinary eruptions; they formed the Deccan Traps, a soul-crushingly huge region in India consisting of igneous rock layers more than two kilometers deep and covering an area of 500,000 square kilometers.
Half a million square kilometers. Yeah: huge.
We’re not dinosaurs…if we choose not to be.
This long-lasting eruption did ecological damage across the planet, weakening life and killing species. The clock was ticking on the dinosaurs and so many other species. When the impact came, their time was up.
There’s pretty good evidence that it took both catastrophes to do in the (non-avian) dinosaurs and 75 percent of species on Earth, but a new study provides more support: Scientists found two warming pulses in Earth’s ocean temperatures corresponding to the times of both the volcanic eruptions and the giant impact. This suggests that large-scale global climate change effects were behind the mass extinction.
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