New Evidence: Volcanoes Killed the Dinosaurs

Much like a cold case murder mystery, the list of suspects in the death of the dinosaurs keeps getting smaller. In the past we've heard about climate change, a black hole, a meteor strike, and even my own explanation, as revealed earlier this year in an article I wrote for Associated Content. New studies point the finger at India as the culprit.

A press release from The Geological Society of America tells of a series of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in India that created an area known as the Deccan Traps. Investigations by several scientists, including Gerta Keller, a paleontologist from Princeton University, support this theory with an incredibly accurate timeline. Keller said "It's the first time we can directly link the main phase of the Deccan Traps to the mass extinction".

Vincent Courtillot, a volcano specialist, stated that the series of geologic explosions in India released enough lava to create up to eighty percent of the Deccan Traps, which cover hundreds of miles. The total event loosed over ten times the amount of climate-changing gases into the air than the meteor crash in Chicxulub, which happened at almost the same time.

The volcanic killer conclusion was reached with the finding of microscopic plankton fossils which developed just after the death of the dinosaurs. These microfossils were found in large numbers in the vicinity of the Bay of Bengal, nearly a thousand miles from the Deccan Traps, which are near Mumbai. About thirty feet of marine sediment were encased between two layers of the lava fields which also contained massive amounts of the plankton.

These microscopic fossils have proven to be a much better gauge of the dinosaur extinction than any other event. When the studies of the Deccan Traps began, scientists placed their formation within 800,000 years of the meteor impact by using something called paleomagnetic signatures, or traces of the shift in the Earth's magnetic fields as they became embedded in the lava.