I’m no scientist, so feel free to chime in here, but... wouldn’t this have caused the sort of “nuclear winter” they’re always talking about with reference to a nuclear war - the clouds eliminating all sunlight until all the plants died and so on?
I mean, so why wasn’t everything extinct after this?
We WERE extinct.
But we got better.
That’s a good point — the fact that it didn’t have that kind of effect goes to show just how pipsqueakish ALL volcanic eruptions are compared with impacts by large pieces of space debris. It’s remarkable how mealy-mouthed this is carried out — oh, the Chicxulub impact didn’t do anything *because dinosaurs were already in the _process_ of going extinct* (emphasis on stuff that makes no sense, more emphasis on stuff that really makes no sense), but this big eruption field called the Deccan Traps caused the mass extinction. Meanwhile this 70K year old supereruption caused the (entirely imaginary) genetic bottleneck in the human species, and only them, and we know its exact extent, era, and duration. Ridiculous.