Study: Massive asteroid also triggered huge magma releases
The asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago appears to have caused huge amounts of magma to spew out of the bottom of the ocean, a new study of seafloor data finds.
The discovery, described in the journal Science Advances, adds to the portrait of an extinction event that was as complex as it was deadly.
For decades, researchers have pointed to a cataclysmic asteroid smashing into the planet as the reason the dinosaurs, and many other species of life on Earth, were wiped out during what’s formally known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event (named for the periods that came before and followed after it). That impact, which scientists think left the roughly 110-mile-wide Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico, would have vaporized living things nearby and sent choking clouds of debris into the air, obscuring the sun.
But scientists have also pointed to another culprit: the Deccan Traps in present-day India, one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world, which just happened to be going gangbusters at the time of the extinction event. The ash and noxious gases from the Deccan Traps are really what killed the dinosaurs, some scientists say, downplaying the asteroid’s role.
“People still argue about which one was actually the primary driver of environmental changes that resulted in the death of dinosaurs,” said senior author Leif Karlstrom, an earth scientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Researchers have also suggested that perhaps the two were connected _ perhaps the asteroid triggered Deccan Trap volcanism, producing a brutal one-two punch that ultimately knocked out roughly three-quarters of the Earth’s plant and animal species. But recent work has shown that the traps started spewing roughly a quarter-million years before the asteroid hit, Karlstrom said.
Still, scientists have wondered if there might indeed be some kind of connection between the two. And lead author Joseph Byrnes, a geophysicist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, realized something: If the asteroid impact had had a major impact on volcanism at the time, that effect should have shown up in the activity along the Earth’s mid-ocean ridges. So he and Karlstrom went looking for it.
The mid-ocean ridges are long cracks in the Earth’s crust at the bottom of the ocean floor where tectonic plates meet. As the plates pull apart, hot magma rises up between them, flowing out on either side of the crack before cooling, creating new seafloor in the process. With more than 40,000 miles of ridges, this network of cracks forms the longest mountain chain on Earth.
The youngest rock is always right at the ridge (where fresh magma keeps producing new rock) and gets older the farther away it is from the ridge on either side.