A new study says that eruptions from mega volcanoes caused several mass extinctions on Earth and contributed to the one that killed the dinosaurs. Image via Andrew Schwark/ Pexels.
EarthSky has a story about the K-Pg mass extinction. The Big Five Mass Extinctions all involved multiple events or conditions to bring about the destruction they wrought. Volcanoes were usually a part of it. A recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes that it was both the flood basalt volcanic eruptions of the Deccan Traps and the meteor strike on the Yucatan Peninsula that brought about the K-Pg mass extinction about 66 million years ago.
The conventional wisdom of recent decades has pointed to an asteroid impact as the reason the dinosaurs disappeared. The smoking gun has been a large crater found in the 1970s to be buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula. Chicxulub crater looks like the site of an asteroid impact some 66 million years ago, the same time the dinosaurs disappeared. But researchers at Dartmouth College said this week (September 12, 2022), that we can’t rule out mega volcanoes as a factor in the dinosaurs’ disappearance. They said mega volcanoes were a key driver in major mass extinctions throughout Earth’s history. Four of Earth’s five great extinctions happened just as mega volcanoes created the vast ancient lava flows we see on Earth today as flood basalts, they said. And they suggested the mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs was due to a double whammy from both volcanoes and an asteroid strike.
