DSeid
March 4, 2021, 2:15am
130
Interesting article here.https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/did-volcanic-eruptions-help-kill-dinosaurs
It does seem like the asteroid strike moving already extensive volcanic activity into higher gear is a reasonable but not firmly proven hypothesis.
Time course was not impact and immediate explosive volcanism. It was a change in currents leading to changes in activity over hundreds of thousands of years.
The researchers’ dates suggest the eruptions began 400,000 years before the impact, and kicked into high gear afterward, releasing 75% of their total volume in the 600,000 years after the asteroid strike. If the Deccan Traps had kicked off global warming, their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions had to come before the lava flows really got going—which, Sprain adds, is plausible, given how much CO2 scientists see leaking from modern volcanoes, even when they’re not erupting.
The dates, and the increase in lava volume after the impact, also line up with a previous suggestion by Sprain’s team, including her former adviser, Paul Renne, a geochronologist at the University of California, Berkeley, that the two events are directly related: The impact might have struck the planet so hard that it sent the Deccan Traps into eruptive high gear . …erupted in four intense pulses rather than continuously, as Sprain suggests. One pulse occurred right before the asteroid strike. That suggests the impact did not trigger the eruptions, he says. Instead, it’s possible this big volcanic pulse before the asteroid impact did play a role in the extinction …