FOUR THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEATH OF THE DINOS

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VOLCANIC ERUPTION New research suggests that the asteroid or comet that slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago rocked the planet so violently that it accelerated a massive volcanic eruption in India, a double catastrophe that wiped

out the dinosaurs and 70 per cent of the Earth’s species. The study, published in the Journal Science, puts a twist on the consensus explanation of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Scientists have long been confident that a mountain-sized object crashed into the planet,

leaving traces even today of a vast crater at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. 2

LAVA FLOOD Scientists have also known that massive volcanism in India was happening around the

same time, spreading lava across a huge region known as the Deccan Traps. The coincidence of those two events initially hinted at causality, but subsequent dating of the Dec

can Traps formations indicated that the flood of basaltic lava began long before the cata

clysmic impact. 3

HUGE EARTHQUAKES With the new data, causality once again came into play. The asteroid or comet didn’t cause the initial eruption, but it could have intensified it, according to the paper. The Chicxulub impact — named after a town in the Yucatan — created earthquakes of magnitude 11 in the vicinity of the crater, the authors say. Magnitude 9 earthquakes would have been felt around the planet,

they say. 4

MASS EXTINCTION Gerta Keller, a Princeton geologist who has long championed the idea that

the volcanism, and not the Chicxulub impact, led to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, said in an email that “there is still the big problem of demonstrating that this impact could have triggered the intense eruptions that led to the mass

extinction.”