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Study of fossil shells solves unanswered question of how deep sea creatures survived asteroid strike during immense upheaval of the world's oceans... Like the dinosaurs themselves, giant marine reptiles, invertebrates and microscopic organisms became extinct after the catastrophic asteroid impact in an immense upheaval of the world's oceans, yet deep sea creatures managed to survive. This has puzzled researchers as it is widely believed that the asteroid impact cut off the food supply in the oceans by destroying free-floating algae and bacteria. However, in a study published in the April issue of the journal Geology, a team led by researchers...

This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won’t be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the...

A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.

LONDON (Reuters) - A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades. A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years' worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a "hellish environment" around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet. Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid...

Volcanoes that erupted in India about 65 million years ago were instrumental in the extinction of dinosaurs, according to new research. For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of dinosaurs, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday. But now Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, says fossilised traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeast Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Keller suggests that the massive volcanic eruptions at the...

The popular theory that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid 65million years ago has been challenged. It was believed the Chicxulub crater in Mexico was the 'smoking gun' of the mass extinction event. Molten droplets from the ancient asteroid impact were found just below the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary - a geological layer of sediment linked with the extinction. But soil samples from the 112-mile wide crater show the impact predates the disappearance of the dinosaurs by about 300,000 years. The latest research has been published in the Journal of the Geological Society. Study author Professor Gerta Keller from Princeton University...

September 15, 2003 Could an enormous volcanic eruption have killed the dinosaurs? Cardiff University -- The extinction of the dinosaurs -– thought to be caused by an asteroid impact some 65 million years ago –- was more likely to have been caused by a 'mantle plume' -– a huge volcanic eruption from deep within the earth's mantle, the region between the crust and the core of the earth. This theory, already supported by a significant body of geologists and palaeontologists, is strengthened by new evidence to be presented at an international conference at Cardiff University on 11-12 September. Research by...

Caption: IU Bloomington geochemist Simon Brassell (right), Penn State sedimentologist Michael Arthur (middle), and Tohoku Univ. sedimentologist Harumasa Kano (left) inspect an ancient shale aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel. BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Ancient rocks from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean suggest dramatic climate changes during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era, a time once thought to have been monotonously hot and humid. In this month's Geology, scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research present new evidence that ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 6 degrees Celsius (about 11 degrees Fahrenheit) during the...

It's bad enough when, every few million years, an asteroid rocks our planet. It's worse if the impact triggers regional or global volcanic activity, which is not only hazardous to nearby plants and animals but can choke Earth's atmosphere with deadly gases for months or years. But there's also a possible bright side, like the birth of nice places like Hawaii. For more than three decades, scientists have explored the question of whether an asteroid impact could cause significant volcanic eruptions, hot spots that spring up out of nowhere and create new landforms or rearrange old ones. The process might...

Source: Geological Society of America Date: October 24, 2006 Far More Than A Meteor Killed Dinos, Evidence Suggests There's growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period. Cottonmouth Creek waterfall over the event deposit with reworked Chicxulub impact spherules. The original Chicxulub ejecta layer was discovered in a yellow clay layer 45 cm below the base of the event deposit. The yellow clay represents a...

Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...

...disaster is “not imminent,” he adds, “This is the type of mechanism that may generate massive plume eruptions, but on the timescale of 100 million to 200 million years from now. So don’t cancel your cruises.”... Hotspot plume supervolcano eruptions like those during the past 2 million years at Wyoming’s Yellowstone caldera, which covered North America with volcanic ash.Gargantuan flood basalt eruptions that created “large igneous provinces” like the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River basalts 17 million to 15 million years ago, India’s Deccan Traps some 65 million years ago and the Pacific’s huge Ontong Java Plateau basalts, which buried an...

A series of gargantuan volcanic eruptions may have ended at nearly the same time that the dinosaurs went extinct, a new study shows. The find bolsters a controversial theory that massive volcanism contributed to the global catastrophe known as the K-T extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and many of Earth's other organisms 65 million years ago. Gerta Keller, a Princeton University paleontologist, presented the new research last week at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. She found that underwater portions of the ancient lava flows, known as the Deccan Traps, contained marine fossils only...

Volcanic Eruptions, Not Meteor, May Have Killed The DinosaursRajahmundry Quarry. Keller's crucial link between the eruption and the mass extinction comes in the form of microscopic marine fossils that are known to have evolved immediately after the mysterious mass extinction event. The same telltale fossilized planktonic foraminifera were found at Rajahmundry near the Bay of Bengal, about 1000 kilometers from the center of the Deccan Traps near Mumbai. (Credit: Photo courtesy Gerta Keller) ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2007) — A series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, not a meteor impact in...

Geoscientists now overwhelmingly agree that a single large asteroid or comet impact, such as Chicxulub in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, could not have been the sole cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Instead, new research in both planetary/space science and multiple earth-science specialties reveals that concomitant volcanic activity and the associated climate and environmental changes were significant contributing factors in four of the five major mass extinctions in Earth history.

A definitive geological timeline shows that a series of massive volcanic explosions 66 million years ago spewed enormous amounts of climate-altering gases into the atmosphere immediately before and during the extinction event that claimed Earth's non-avian dinosaurs, according to new research from Princeton University. A primeval volcanic range in western India known as the Deccan Traps, which were once three times larger than France, began its main phase of eruptions roughly 250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, extinction event, the researchers report in the journal Science. For the next 750,000 years, the volcanoes unleashed more than 1.1 million cubic...

Earth's volcanism linked to meteorite impacts 14:31 13 December 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print EditionSpace rocks are blamed for violent eruptions (Image: GETTY) Large meteorite impacts may not just throw up huge dust clouds but also punch right through the Earth's crust, triggering gigantic volcanic eruptions. The idea is controversial, but evidence is mounting that the Earth's geology has largely been driven by such events. This would also explain why our planet has so few impact crater remnants. Counting the number of asteroids we see in the sky suggests that over the past 250 million years, Earth should have...

The asteroid that slammed into the ocean off Mexico 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs probably rang the Earth like a bell, triggering volcanic eruptions around the globe that may have contributed to the devastation, according to a team of University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists. Specifically, the researchers argue that the impact likely triggered most of the immense eruptions of lava in India known as the Deccan Traps, explaining the "uncomfortably close" coincidence between the Deccan Traps eruptions and the impact, which has always cast doubt on the theory that the asteroid was the sole cause of...

Here, for the first time (to our knowledge), we are able to demonstrate unambiguously that the impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg, ∼66 Mya) was followed by a so-called “impact winter.” This impact winter was the result of the injection of large amounts of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere and significantly reduced incoming solar radiation for decades. Therefore, this phase will have been a key contributory element in the extinctions of many biological clades, including the dinosaurs. The K–Pg boundary impact presents a unique event in Earth history because it caused global change at an unparalleled rate. This detailed...

Chelyabinsk, a large city in western Russia, was best known for producing tractors and professional hockey players until the morning of February 15, 2013, when a 19-meter-wide meteor screamed through the sky and exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT. The meteor generated a fireball many times brighter than the sun, so powerful it even caused sunburns. The shock wave blew out windows and knocked residents off of their feet, injuring more than 1,200. The object was the largest to strike Earth in more than a century... Asteroids that come within 28 million miles of our planet are...