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Published online 16 December 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1308
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Volcanoes implicated in death of dinosaurs
Groups argue that an impact wasn't to blame.
Three research teams have released evidence suggesting that the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by massive volcanic eruptions in India, rather than a meteorite impact, as most scientists have thought.
The research, based on samples from drilling in India, shows that four large eruptions coincided with the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) extinction event, which killed off a large fraction of life on land and in the seas.
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A major prooblem with the idea that the Deccan traps caused the mass extinction at the K/T boundary is that the so-called "intertrappean" deposits, sedimentary rocks deposited in Deccan between lava flows, contain a fairly normal assemblage of continental fossils. How can this be reconciled with the supposedly devastating effects of the Deccan eruptions ? If these eruptions had little effect on the local fauna, how can they be expected to have wiped out dinosaurs (and many organisms) worldwide ? Eric Buffetaut
Was there any chance that this volcano eruption followed by the meteorite impact?
These are very exiting findings. And they really shed a light on worst-case scenario for human species as well. But why the volcano and asteroid theories are mentioned as isolated events? What are the chances that two simultaneously going dramatic events in Earth history happened independently of each other? We know that a massive asteroid impact on earth can result in a ?contrecoup effect?, a massive eruptions at the antipodal region from the impact due to the mantle shock-wave-mediated damage to the earth crust. And Chicxulub and Indian volcano eruption site are actually antipodal to each other.