Lead author Courtney Sprain standing in front of an inflated sheet lobe in the Jawhar Formation in a quarry north of
Mumbai, India.
Map outlining exposed areas of the Deccan Traps in modern day India. Credit: Courtney Sprain
Isn't that a value judgment, that it was a bad thing for the dinosaurs to become extinct? Maybe they should be talking about "credit."
I’m guessing a socialist took over managing the dinosaurs, and shortly thereafter, they ran out of them.
In before The Far Side
Gary Larson, the Far Side, has already solved the question of dinosaur extinction.
Only Brian William really knows, right?
I think the dinosaur distinction was caused by a black hole.
No. Neither volcanoes nor asteroid are moral agents.
Both, imho.
Asteroids by themselves are fairly benign, so for these to have caused so much mayhem, it probably had volcanoes on the Asteroid and I wouldn’t be surprised if an ancestor of a Tesla SUV wasn’t also on it to be so evil. /s <;^0
Fascinating information, ETL. I didn’t know the big basalt flows were known as “traps.”
The scale is unimaginably immense...
• 160 miles across
• Up to 1.2 miles thick
• Lasting up to one million years
• Climate-altering volcanic gases leak out of underground magma chambers frequently, and not just during eruptions
• The most recent basalt flow, near the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, dwindled 15 million years ago after 400,000 years of eruptions.
In geologic history, 15 million years ago and 65 million years ago is not very far back. Could similar basalt flows occur again? Would the gases emitted poison the atmosphere and doom mankind?
Has anybody tried to quantify the volume of “climate-altering gases leaking out of underground magma chambers” and compare it to man-made emissions? Is it possible that this leakage together with the sun is what really controls climate and man is making negligible contributions?
Large asteroid hits Chicxulub resulting in massive local destruction and formation of a crater 100 miles across. The shock wave from its impact travels through the center of the earth and exits at the opposite site producing many deep cracks in the crust that leak large volumes of lava for millennia as well as large volumes of gases that change the climate. The net effect of these direct and indirect effects from the asteroid hit is a mass extinction. Although the Deccan traps so linked are a very large ‘flood basalt eruption’ they aren’t the largest such known on land. That would be the Siberian Traps, the date of which at least roughly coincides with the largest of all mass extinctions, the end Permian extinction. Its reasonable to guess an even larger asteroid hit triggered those ‘Traps’ although a corresponding crater has yet to confirmed.
It was Trump’s fault.
Drilling in 2016 into the Chicxulub crater found a dearth of gypsum, a sulfate mineral, which is common in the surrounding bedrock. Their theory is that the gypsum that had been in the crater itself was aerosolized by the impact and the gaseous sulfur encircled the planet, causing a nukular winter.
Exxon and BP sent the Asteroid. They were forward thinking.