CANADA: New research suggests that the asteroid or comet that slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago rocked the planet so violently that it accelerated a massive volcanic eruption in India, a double catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs and 70 per cent of the Earth’s species.
The study, published in the journal Science, puts a twist on the consensus explanation of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Scientists have long been confident that a mountain-sized object crashed into Earth, leaving traces even today of a vast crater at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
They’ve also known that massive volcanism in India was happening about the same time, spreading lava across a huge region known as the Deccan Traps. The coincidence of those two events initially hinted at causality, but subsequent dating of the Deccan Traps formations indicated that the flood of basaltic lava began long before the cataclysmic impact.
