Scientists: asteroid kill the dinosaurs made the Earth “bursting at the seams»
The fall of the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, caused the planet to “crumble” and caused a series of powerful eruptions of volcanoes, located at the junction of tectonic plates at the bottom of the oceans of the Earth, says the article, published in the journal Science Advances.
“We found evidence that the volcanic activity level has increased dramatically worldwide during the mass extinction. We’re not talking about the fact that this event killed the dinosaurs, we just point out that this disaster was accompanied by an abnormally high frequency of volcanic eruptions on the seabed and the ocean floor,” notes Joseph Byrnes (Byrnes Joseph) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (USA).
The majority of paleontologists and geologists today believe that the last mass extinction of animals on Earth, which occurred 65.5 million years ago was caused by an asteroid impact left a giant 300 km of the Chicxulub crater on the seabed off the coast of southern Mexico. His fall no doubt, but its role in the extinction of dinosaurs and marine reptiles is still a matter of debate.
For example, in 1989 known paleontologist mark Richards of the University of California at Berkeley (USA) presented an alternative explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs — in his view, the reason for their disappearance was the massive outpouring of magma and volcanic eruptions on the site of the modern plateau Dean in India that occurred approximately at the same time. According to his calculations, such events should occur every 20-30 million years due to the rise of hot magma flow, the so-called “plume”, from the depths to the surface of the Earth.
Byrnes and his team found that both of these events can be linked, by studying change in the structure of rocks on the seabed of the Earth in the first years after the fall of the asteroid.