There's good evidence that the dinosaurs on Earth were killed not by an asteroid, but instead, or additionally, by enormous eruptions in what now is India.
Even moderate eruptions, which kick up huge amounts of soot and dust, blocking sunlight, can have climatic effects. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines significantly cooled the planet in 1991-92, as did Indonesia's Krakatoa in 1883. More effective was Mount Tambora on the other end of Java in 1815, which cooled things so much that Europeans called 1816 "the year without a summer" it snowed in June, and summer frosts killed crops across the Northern Hemisphere. Moving up the scale, the Mount Toba supervolcanic eruption in Sumatra 75,000 years ago may have cooled the planet enough to force the early human population through a genetic "bottleneck" as most people died, leaving the few survivors to repopulate the world. And the Yellowstone supervolcano that's right, Yellowstone National Park sits atop a massive magma chamber will probably take out most of the people living between the Rockies and the Appalachians next time it erupts, which could literally be tomorrow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh9zVXUv-Fs But neither of those would end life on Earth. For that, it would take something along the lines of the long-ago prolonged eruptions that created India's Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps in Russia. In both instances, giant fissures in the ground simply opened up, oozing lava that spread in every direction for hundreds of miles, releasing huge amounts of deadly gas, smoke and soot into the atmosphere. These events went on for tens of thousands of years. The Deccan Traps eruptions took place just before the dinosaurs disappeared and formed much of the landmass of the Indian subcontinent. The Siberian lava flows happened 251 million years ago and are the likely cause of the aforementioned Permian-Triassic mass extinction. In the latter case, 3 million square miles were covered by layer upon layer of lava. It doesn't take much extrapolation to conclude that an eruption event two or three times the magnitude of the Siberian one could end life on Earth. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,477084,00.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:284306 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
