Could Volcanoes in India have Actually Killed the Dinosaurs?

An artist's perspective of the impact that may have offed the dinosaurs. (Image: NASA) The demise of the dinosaurs is the stuff of middle school science classes: everybody knows that a massive meteorite crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, setting off a series of calamities. Tsunamis rocked back and forth across the oceans, a scalding cloud of dust and ash shot outward from the impact site, and secondary impacts from the initial ejecta ignited forest fires far from ground zero. None of this was good news for the charismatic megafauna roaming the planet 66 million years ago, but it might not have been the only existential threat on the horizon. Halfway around the world, prodigious volcanic eruptions were forming the Deccan Traps in modern-day western India. Over tens of thousands of years, trillions of cubic meters of lava burst onto the Earth’s surface, ultimately covering 1.5 million square kilometers (an area ...