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Asteroid that killed dinosaurs may have triggered largest lava flows on Earth

Those eruptions in what are known as the Deccan Traps in what is now India, lasted for hundreds of thousands of years

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A team of geophysicists has suggested that the asteroid that crashed into the Earth 66 million years ago may not have been the sole cause of the end of the dinosaurs; it may in fact have triggered massive volcanic eruptions around the globe that finished the job.

UC Berkeley researchers said that the asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico would have "rung" the Earth like a bell and could have triggered eruptions including massive lava flows in India that covered an area the size of California with lava up to a mile deep.

Those eruptions in what are known as the Deccan Traps in what is now India, lasted for hundreds of thousands of years and likely emitted huge amounts of climate-altering gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, possibly finishing off what the asteroid started in terms of the fate of the dinosaurs

Team leader Mark Richards added that if people try to explain why the largest impact they know of in the last billion years happened within 100,000 years of these massive lava flows at Deccan, the chances of that occurring at random are minuscule, which is not a very credible coincidence.

The Deccan lava eruptions had in fact begun before the asteroid impact, but may have been re-ignited about 100,000 years later and amplified by the effects of the cosmic collision, the researchers noted.

Richards has proposed that plumes of hot rocks rise through the mantle of the Earth every 20 million to 30 million years to generate huge flows of lava called flood basalts, similar to what is seen in the Deccan Traps, adding that the last four of the six known mass extinctions of life on Earth have been associated with the timing of these massive eruptions.

He added that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatán Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico may have generated magnitude 9 earthquakes anywhere on the Earth, sufficient to re-ignite the Deccan flood basalts.

He noted that the 100,000-year time gap between the impact and the resumed volcanic activity makes sense; it would take just about that amount of time for the massive amounts of magma to reach the Earth's surface.

The study is published in The Geological Society of America Bulletin. (ANI)

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