What Really Killed Dinosaurs and Other Life on Earth? Maybe Not an Asteroid Strike

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

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 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 extinction events that reshaped life on planet Earth in a geological instant. Some experts believe that comets or asteroids that crashed into Earth were the most likely agents of mass destruction. Other scientists argue that immense volcanic eruptions were the primary cause of the extinction events. A new Dartmouth-led study published on September 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports that volcanic activity appears to have been the key driver of mass extinctions.

These new findings provide the most compelling quantitative evidence to date that the link between major volcanic eruptions and wholesale species turnover is not just coincidental.

According to the researchers, four of the five mass extinctions are contemporaneous with a type of volcanic outpouring called a flood basalt. These eruptions flood vast areas-even an entire continent-with lava in a mere million years. In a geological time scale, that is just the blink of an eye. They leave behind massive fingerprints as evidence-extensive regions of step-like, igneous rock (solidified from the erupted lava) that geologists call large igneous provinces."

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