Did volcanoes kill dinosaurs? New research says no

If you were to ask Joe Blow on the street how the dinosaurs went extinct, he would probably say an asteroid wiped them out, but the truth is a little more complex than that. At this point, we are well aware that a massive asteroid about 10 to 15 kilometers wide struck Earth about 66 million years ago. We even know where it hit. The Chicxulub Crater, located in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, is 150 kilometers wide. Quite hard to miss.

But many scientists still subscribe to the theory that a vast volcanic chain, located in India, was the main driver of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. This volcanic chain, called Deccan Traps, is at the center of this debate.

We know that lava spat out of these Deccan traps during the time the dinosaurs went extinct, but we don’t know the exact time of these eruptions, or whether the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere was large enough to cause the type of warming consistent with past extinction events.

Until now.

Recent research by a multi-institutional team led by scientists from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, attempted to measure the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, in the hope of understanding the role played by volcanoes in the fifth extinction event.

The results? Volcanic eruptions were probably not a major factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“Our team analyzed the Deccan Traps CO2 budgets that coincided with the warming event,” said Andres Hernandez Nava, Ph.D. student at the Graduate Center, Earth and Environmental Sciences program at CUNY, “and we discovered that the carbon outgassing of lava volumes alone could not have caused this level of global warming.

The team used lasers and ion beams to measure carbon dioxide from frozen magma trapped inside Deccan Traps crystals from the late Cretaceous and modeled this climate with the aim of testing them. impacts of the release of Deccan Traps on surface temperatures. The data revealed that most likely the Deccan traps contributed to an increase in temperature of around 3 degrees Celsius. Significant, of course, but probably not enough to create a fifth extinction event.

In short, as my five year old son says when I ask who killed the dinosaurs: “A big rock got them.”