Chicxulub Impact Wiped Out The Dinosaurs, Experts Claim

Thursday, March 4, 2010 - 16:07 in Paleontology & Archaeology

An asteroid colliding with Earth was responsible for the Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, according to a new review published in Science. Scientists have previously argued about whether the extinction was caused by the asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted approximately 1.5 million years. These eruptions spewed 1,100,000 km3 of basalt lava across the Deccan Traps, which would have been enough to fill the Black Sea twice, and were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale. read more

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