'Dinosaur-killing' asteroid may have triggered largest lava flows on Earth

A team of geophysicists has suggested that the asteroid that crashed into the Earth 66 million years ago may not have been the sole cause of the end of the dinosaurs; it may in fact have triggered massive volcanic eruptions around the globe that finished the job.

UC Berkeley researchers said that the asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico would have "rung" the Earth like a bell and could have triggered eruptions including massive lava flows in India that covered an area the size of California with lava up to a mile deep.

Those eruptions in what are known as the Deccan Traps in what is now India, lasted for hundreds of thousands of years and likely emitted huge amounts of climate-altering gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, possibly finishing off what the asteroid started in terms of the fate of the dinosaurs

Team leader Mark Richards added that if people try to explain why the largest impact they know of in the last billion years happened within 100,000 years of these massive lava flows at Deccan, the chances of that occurring at random are minuscule, which is not a very credible coincidence.

The Deccan lava eruptions had in fact begun before the asteroid impact, but may have been re-ignited about 100,000 years later and amplified by the effects of the cosmic collision, the researchers noted.

Richards has proposed that plumes of hot rocks rise through the mantle of the Earth every 20 million to 30 million years to generate huge flows of lava called flood basalts, similar to what is seen in the Deccan Traps, adding that the last four of the six known mass extinctions of life on Earth have been associated with the timing of these massive eruptions.

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