Meteorite Impact May Have Triggered Largest Pulse Of Deccan Basalt Eruptions

Posted: 21 Oct 2014

What caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago?

a) It was a meteorite impact and the resulting environmental crises.
b) No, it was the Deccan basalt eruptions and the resulting environmental crises.
c) It was both, the meteorite impact and the eruptions.

The two mechanisms were distinct. One, a calamity from space and the other a gigantic eruption whose cause was from deep within the earth.

Now, it seems they may be more intimately linked. The meteorite impact may have triggered the largest pulse of the Deccan volcanic eruptions. Be careful here. The impact did not initiate Deccan volcanism. That was caused by India rifting away from Madagascar (88 mya) and Seychelles (66 mya). The rifting and an unusually hot mantle underneath resulted in copious amounts of melt being generated in the mantle which found its way to the surface via the great tensional cracks formed when continents separate. The impact though may have resulted in increasing the permeability of the mantle underneath thus making it possible for larger amounts of magma to make its way to the surface.

Abstract- 2014 GSA Annual Meeting, Vancouver:

New constraints on the timing of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction and the Chicxulub impact, together with a particularly voluminous and apparently brief eruptive pulse toward the end of the "main-stage" eruptions of the Deccan continental flood basalt province, suggest that these three events may have occurred within less than about a hundred thousand years of each other. Partial melting induced by the Chicxulub event does not provide an energetically-plausible explanation for this coincidence, and both geochronologic and magnetic-polarity data show that Deccan volcanism was underway well before Chicxulub/K-Pg time. However, historical data document that eruptions from existing volcanic systems can be triggered by earthquakes. Seismic modeling of the ground motion due to the Chicxulub impact suggests that the impact could have generated seismic energy densities of order 0.1-1.0 J/m3 throughout the upper ~200 km of the Earth's mantle, sufficient to trigger volcanic eruptions worldwide based upon comparison with historical examples. Triggering may have been caused by a transient increase in the effective permeability of the existing deep magmatic system beneath the Deccan province, or mantle plume "head." It is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that the Chicxulub impact might have triggered the enormous Poladpur, Ambenali, and Mahabaleshwar (Wai sub-group) lava flows that account for >70% of the Deccan Traps main-stage eruptions. This hypothesis is consistent with independent stratigraphic, geochronologic, geochemical, and tectonic constraints, which combine to indicate that at approximately Chicxulub/K-Pg time a huge pulse of mantle plume-derived magma passed through the crust with little interaction, and erupted to form the most extensive and voluminous lava flows known on Earth. High-precision radioisotopic dating of the main-phase Deccan flood basalt formations may be able either to confirm or reject this hypothesis, which in turn might help determine whether this singular outburst within the Deccan Traps (and possibly volcanic eruptions worldwide) contributed significantly to the K-Pg extinction.

Elsewhere in a GSA special issue on volcanism, impacts and mass extinctions more evidence that Deccan volcanism had a significant impact on the fauna and flora.

Chronology of the volcanic episodes is improving and pointing to a scenario wherein the volcanism coincided (or was causally connected) to within a hundred thousand years of the Chicxulub impact and overlapped the stratigraphic horizon defined as the Cretaceous -Paleogene boundary. Looks like everyone is going to be partially right on this one.

Multiple causes for the mass extinction.

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