Dartmouth-led research fortifies link between mega volcanoes and mass extinctions. What killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period? It has long been the topic of scientific debate, and many researchers have set out to determine what caused the five mass extincti
While some scientists think that asteroid and comet strikes are the cause of mass extinction events on Earth, new research from Dartmouth points to volcanic eruptions as the key driver.What killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of thePeriod? It has long been the topic of scientific debate, and many researchers have set out to determine what caused the five mass extinction events that reshaped life on planet Earth in a geological instant.
To count as “large,” a large igneous province must contain at least 100,000 cubic kilometers of magma. For context, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens involved less than one cubic kilometer of magma. According to the researchers, most of the volcanoes represented in the study erupted on the order of a million times more lava than that.
Volcanic eruptions also rocked the Indian subcontinent around the time of the great dinosaur die-off, forming what is known today as the Deccan plateau. This, much like the asteroid strike, would have had far-reaching global effects, blanketing the atmosphere in dust and toxic fumes, suffocating dinosaurs and other life in addition to altering the climate on long time scales.
At Dartmouth, Green set out to find a way to quantify the apparent link between eruptions and extinctions and test whether the coincidence was just chance or whether there was evidence of a causal relationship between the two. Working with Keller and co-author Paul Renne, professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science at theand director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, Green recruited the supercomputers at the Dartmouth Discovery Cluster to crunch the numbers.
Rather than considering the absolute magnitude of eruptions, the team of researchers ordered the volcanic events by the rate at which they spewed lava. They found that the volcanic events with the highest eruptive rates did indeed cause the most destruction, producing more severe extinctions up to the mass extinctions.
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