More recent research by Morgan et al. (1997) employed seismic reflection
data from the offshore portion of the crater to obtain a clearer picture
of the crater's shape and size. The transient crater, or hole from the initial
impact (fig.3), appears to have been 85 km in diameter, caused by a 10-14
km meteor. The overall crater would have included three rings: a peak ring
80 km in diameter, a 130 km inner ring, and a 195 km outer ring. When newly
formed, this structure would have resembled other multi-ringed craters, as
on Venus, Mercury, Europa,
or the Moon. Beads of altered green glass called tektites probably
related to the formation of Chicxulub Crater have also been found in Belize
480 km from the crater (Ocampo and Pope 1998). Similar tektites, formed
from the heat of the Chicxulub impact, are scattered as far afield
as Haiti and north Mexico.
Oct 1, 2015 - Some 66 million years ago, the seismic energy from the Chicxulub impact may have set off dramatic lava flows from the Deccan traps, dooming ..
The majority of volcanic eruptions took place
at the area of modern Mumbai. Researchers believe that large-scale
series of eruptions lasted about 30 000 years.
Figure 1 Satellite bathymetry map of the western Indian Ocean
basin. Approximate aerial extent of Deccan Traps lava flows are shown
by the gray fields on the Indian subcontinent. Numbers in the shaded
region correspond to sampling regions: 1 – Kutch (samples 1-5), 2 –
Saurashtra (samples 6-46), 3 – Pavagadh, Kalsubai, Amba Dongar and
surrounds (samples 48-54, 63-78), 4 – Dhule and surrounds (samples
55-62), 5 – Mumbai, Western Ghats and coastal Maharashtra (samples
79-115, MMF7). Approximate trace of the Réunion hotspot is shown by the
transparent black arrow, approximate plate motion vectors are shown by
solid black arrows over land areas and are proportional to plate
motions. Base map reproduced from the GEBCO world map 2014,
www.gebco.net.
Deccan Traps Lava at Arabian Sea at Goa, India Deccan Traps Volcano - John Seach
The Deccan Traps is located in central west India and dates from 66 million years ago.
The lava flows are some of the largest on earth covering 900 km and meet the coast at the Arabian Sea.
Deccan volcanism coincided with the decline of the dinosaurs raising the possibility
that the Indian volcanoes were involved with their decline.
Deccan lava meets the Arabian Sea at Goa. The lava flows cover 900 km throughout central and western India.
The Reunion mantle plume was responsible for the lava flows which covered 500 000 sq km.
Scientists
studied ancient fish to determine that the asteroid that struck
Chicxulub, Mexico 66 million years ago caused the Earth's temperatures
to skyrocket.
The
Chicxulub asteroid - which caused the extinction of dinosaurs - drove a
long-lasting era of global warming when it smashed into Earth 65
million years ago, ...
Oct 7, 2017 - Two Princeton University research teams have challenged the theory that the Chicxulub crater in Mexico caused the demise of the dinosaurs.
Feb 9, 2018 - When the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth, it filled the skies with soot and ... The Deccan Traps, a massive volcanic province in what's now India, ...
Oct 1, 2015 - Some 66 million years ago, the seismic energy from the Chicxulub impact may have set off dramatic lava flows from the Deccan traps, dooming ...
Feb 7, 2018 - More bad news for dinosaurs: Chicxulub meteorite impact triggered global .... Just over 66 million years ago, the Deccan Traps start erupting ... Which played a larger role in driving the extinction: the volcanism or the meteor?
Dec 18, 2014 - The Deccan Traps' part in the K-Pg extinction is consistent with the ... The K-Pg extinction is the only one that coincides with an asteroid impact, he said. ... and the meteorite impact near present-day Chicxulub, Mexico, need to ...
Layered lava flows of the Deccan Traps east of Mumbai, India. Credit: Mark Richards/UC Berkeley
Berkeley geologists have uncovered
compelling evidence that an asteroid impact on Earth 66 million years
ago accelerated the eruptions of volcanoes in India for hundreds of
thousands of years, and that together these planet-wide catastrophes
caused the extinction of many land and marine animals, including the
dinosaurs.
For 35 years,
paleontologists and geologists have debated the role these two global
events played in the last mass extinction, with one side claiming the eruptions were irrelevant, and the other side claiming the impact was a blip in a long-term die-off.
The new evidence includes the most accurate dates yet for the
volcanic eruptions before and after the impact. The new dates show that
the Deccan Traps lava flows,
which at the time were erupting at a slower pace, doubled in output
within 50,000 years of the asteroid or comet impact that is thought to
have initiated the last mass extinction on Earth.
Both the impact and the volcanism would have blanketed the planet
with dust and noxious fumes, drastically changing the climate and
sending many species to an early grave.
"Based on our dating of the lavas, we can be pretty certain that the
volcanism and the impact occurred within 50,000 years of the extinction,
so it becomes somewhat artificial to distinguish between them as
killing mechanisms: both phenomena were clearly at work at the same
time," said lead researcher Paul Renne, a UC Berkeley
professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science and director of
the Berkeley Geochronology Center. "It is going to be basically
impossible to ascribe actual atmospheric effects to one or the other.
They both happened at the same time."
The geologists argue that the impact abruptly changed the volcanoes'
plumbing system, which produced major changes in the chemistry and
frequency of the eruptions. After this change, long-term volcanic
eruptions likely delayed recovery of life for 500,000 years after the KT
boundary, the term for the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of
the Tertiary period when large land animals and many small sea creatures
disappeared from the fossil record.
"The biodiversity and chemical signature of the ocean took about half
a million years to really recover after the KT boundary, which is about
how long the accelerated volcanism lasted," Renne said. "We are
proposing that the volcanism unleashed and accelerated right at the KT
boundary suppressed the recovery until the volcanoes waned."
Co-author Mark Richards, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and
planetary science and the one who originally proposed that the comet or asteroid impact
reignited the Deccan Traps lava flows, is agnostic about which event
was the real death knell for much of life on Earth. But the link between
the impact and the flood basalts is becoming harder to deny.
A map showing the extent of the Deccan Traps volcanic region in
India, which dates from 64-67 million years ago. The rectangle shows the
region near Mumbai from which the Berkeley team obtained lava samples
used in the new precision dating …more"If
our high-precision dates continue to pin these three events - the
impact, the extinction and the major pulse of volcanism - closer and
closer together, people are going to have to accept the likelihood of a
connection among them. The scenario we are suggesting - that the impact
triggered the volcanism - does in fact reconcile what had previously
appeared to be an unimaginable coincidence," he said.
Renne, Richards and their colleagues will publish the new dates for
the Deccan Traps eruptions in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Science. Impact or volcanism?
Since 1980, when UC Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez and his father,
the late UC Berkeley physicist Luis Alvarez, discovered evidence of a
comet or asteroid impact on Earth 66 million years ago, scientists have
argued about whether the impact was the cause of the mass extinction
that occurred at the same time, the end of the Cretaceous period, or
the KT boundary. Some argued that the huge volcanic eruptions in India
known as the Deccan Traps, which occurred around the same time, were the
main culprit in the extinctions. Others insisted the death knell had
been the impact, which left behind a large crater dubbed Chicxulub off
Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, and viewed the Deccan Traps eruptions as a
minor sideshow.
Earlier this year, Richards, Renne and eight other geoscientists
proposed a new scenario: that the impact ignited volcanoes around the
globe, most catastrophically in India, and that the two events combined
to cause the KT extinction.
Paul Renne inspects a reddened soil horizon between lava flows
in the Deccan Traps region of India. Renne is director of the Berkeley
Geochronology Center and a professor-in-residence at UC Berkeley.
Credit: Mark Richards/UC Berkeley
In attempts to test this hypothesis, the
team last year collected lava samples from throughout the Deccan Traps
east of Mumbai, sampling flows from near the beginning, several hundred
thousand years before the extinction and near the end, some half a
million years after the extinction. High-precision argon-40/argon-39
isotope dating allowed them to establish the chronology of the flows and
the rate of flow over time.
In the Science paper, they describe major changes in the
Deccan Traps volcanism, which was probably "bubbling along happily,
continuously and relatively slowly" before the extinction, Renne said.
After the impact, the eruption rate more than doubled and the volcanism
became more punctuated, with more voluminous lava flows interspersed
with long periods of quiet. This is consistent with a change in the
underground plumbing feeding the flows, he said: Smaller magma chambers
before the impact became larger, which means they took longer to fill
but spewed more lava when they did erupt.
"At the KT boundary, we see major changes in the volcanic system of
the Deccan Traps, in terms of the rate at which eruptions were
happening, the size of the eruptions, the volume of the eruptions and
some aspects of the chemistry of the eruptions, which speaks to the
actual processes by which the magmas were generated," Renne said. "All
these things changed in a fundamental way, and increasingly it seems
they happened right at the KT boundary. Our data don't conclusively
prove that the impact caused these changes, but the connection looks
increasingly clear."
Richards said that a large nearby earthquake of a magnitude 8, 9 or
10 - as large or larger than the quake that struck Japan in 2011 - could
also have reignited the Deccan Trap flows. In fact, large quakes may
have rattled underground magma chambers and ignited eruptions throughout
Earth's history. But the simultaneous changes in the lava flows and the
impact at the KT boundary seem more than mere coincidence.
"These changes are consistent with an accelerated rate of magma
production and eruption that you could get from a large earthquake such
as would be created by the Chicxulub impact," he said.
In 2013, Renne and his team at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and
elsewhere also dated the KT boundary extinction and dust from the impact
and found they occurred within less than 32,000 years of one another -
the blink of an eye in geologic terms, he said. Renne's team plans to
obtain isotope dates for more basalt samples from the Deccan Traps to
detail the history of the lava flows that cover much of western India,
in order to better understand how they changed with time and correlate
to the impact and extinctions. Meanwhile, Richards is working with
volcano experts to understand how large ground shaking caused by
earthquakes or asteroid impacts affects volcanic eruptions.
The Deccan Traps began forming 66.25 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. The bulk of the volcanic eruption occurred at the Western Ghats some 66 million years ago. This series of eruptions may have lasted less than 30,000 years in total.
Feb 13, 2017 - Toronto.Outlook February 13, 2017 15:16 IST India's Deccan Traps Formed by Two Eruptions: Study. 1970-01-01T05:30:00+0530. India's Deccan Traps - one of the largest volcanic features on the Earth - may have formed due to eruptions from two distinct plumes, a new study suggests.
Apr 30, 2015 - “If you try to explain why the largest impact we know of in the last billion ... volcanic eruption in China called the Emeishan Traps is associated with the ... “Then you have the Deccan eruptions – including the largest mapped ...
Feb 10, 2017 - Some 65 million years ago, the skies over India darkened as one of Earth's biggest volcanic eruptions burbled from below. It rumbled on for ...
India's Deccan Traps - one of the largest volcanic
features on the Earth - may have formed due to eruptions from two
distinct plumes, a new study suggests. ... Says Kiren Rijiju · 13
February 2017 Last Updated at 3:16 pm International ...
Dec 11, 2014 - They
believe the extinction was caused, at least in part, by an
extraordinary volcanic eruption in India. This eruption created the Deccan Traps, ...
Dec 18, 2014 - The researchers suggest that the Deccan Traps eruptions and the Chicxulub ... in the last 500 million years coincided with large volcanic eruptions ... in tiny grains — less than a half-millimeter in size — of the mineral zircon.
Oct 1, 2015 - Layered lava flows of the Deccan Traps east of Mumbai, India. ... in the last mass extinction, with one side claiming the eruptions were irrelevant ... signature of the ocean took about half a million years to really recover after the ...
Oct 1, 2015 - Another more recent hypothesis suggests that the dino die-offs occurred after a ... lava layers at sites in the Deccan Plateau of central and western India. They found that the Deccan eruptions started at least 173,000 years before the ... How the asteroid impact half a world away from India bumped up lava ...
Josue Alexei Moreno Figueroa2 years ago. WOW I WOLD RUN SO FAST .... No wonder volcanoes cool the whole ...
NOTICE
THE INFLECTION POINT, OF A RE-ORIENTATION OF AT LEAST 30 DEGREES- OF
TRANSFORMS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN, JUST BELOW THE 90E RIDGE (THE PATH OF
THE SUBCONTINENT, BEFORE COLLISION TO FORM THE HIMALAYAS): As
conjectured in the below diagram, the crater of the CHICXULUB asteroid
strike effected a bulge antipodal to the Yucatan 22N, 89W Longitude
location (Merida, Mexico). As shown, the uplift would have fractured the
edges of the subcontinent drastically, allowing outpouring of basalt,
which originated at a depth where it would have been hot and plastic at
its pre-strike condition.
The city of dreams, Mumbai
never fails to amaze. Every time you think that you know everything
that there is to know about the city including its food, street and
history something comes up to take you by surprise. The city holds so
many opportunities, so much energy and zest and still manages to find an
order in the chaos. The city has everything and emotions, love and
charisma run high in the veins of an average Mumbaikar.
The city has everything, the emotions, the passion, the love as well as
the ugly. But there is an ancient secret hidden in the heart of Mumbai
and most often people do not know anything about this structure that
stands quietly watching its teeming millions. Gilbert Hill in Andheri
West is not a hidden, secret structure but what it stands for is
something that many people would not be aware of. It is one of the
world’s three most oldest structure and is still battling time.
If
you had read your geography in school properly you would remember that
Mumbai and Maharashtra is on the Deccan Plateau which is made of
volcanic soil and is pretty barren. There must have been a volcanic
eruption or something similar in this part of the country which gave
rise to the black soil and the infertile plateau here. Gilbert Hill,
located in Andheri West is one special phenomenon that bears testimony
to this fact, and you would ask what is so special about this? Well,
because it is older than all the memories of humanity. The hill is older
than any tree that has ever sprouted and older than any mountain that
is out there today. It is even older than our concept of time and it is
one of the world’s only three oldest things still battling time. Chinese Scientists Teleported A Particle In Space For The First Time, The Photon Sent Is A Major Breakthrough
NOBODY KNOWS – The Hidden Secret of Mumbai. Watch video here:
The
extinction of dinosaurs was the last mass extinction of life on Earth
and resulted due to a meteor strike that triggered volcanoes all across
the world that ultimately formed the land that we walk on today. A
gigantic bubble of lava froze in mid-air at three different places in
the world and formed three gigantic rocks that is testimony to the
earliest life that roamed the Earth. These three rocks will always stand
the test of time. The Devil’s Postpile in California
Source: YouTubeThe Devil’s Tower in Wyoming
Source: YouTubeGilbert Hill in Andheri West, Mumbai
Source: YouTubeGilbert
Hill is a monolith column of black basalt rock and actually dates back
to the Mesozoic Era about 66 million years ago. The best part about this
is that you can see, touch and experience something this old. Watch the
video above, this can be the best and wonderful moment of your day
today, and if you’re in Mumbai then take time out and visit Gilbert
Hill, after all it is silently watching and probably waiting for you to
acknowledge it!
Sci-fied reality is very much here and now. The
twenty-first century arrived almost twenty years ago, and it is no
surprise that flying taxis, choppers in space, bot-human love stories or
even the existence of a new species existence get written every other
day. Alongside all of this, there are scientists like Adam Rutherford,
who says that the ultimate storage device will be made of DNA.
This,
of course, raises the important question: What are humans really, when
it comes to consideration of genetics? Much as we think of ourselves as
sophisticated species, we have fewer genes than a grain of rice. Yet, we
are the only ones to ask, “What are we?” This enigma lies at the heart
of Rutherford’s new book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived.
A riff on Stephen Hawking’s most accessible
work, this book is heavy on ambition while being quick in pace and
sweeping the reader off their feet from the word go. Rutherford, a
geneticist who hosts the popular BBC Radio 4 show, Inside Science, sets
the bar high by explaining how homo sapiens ought to understand the basic building block of life, the gene, to understand who we really are:
“Our
genomes, genes and DNA house a record of the journey that life on Earth
has taken – 4 billion years of error and trial that resulted in you.
Your genome is the totality of your DNA, 3 billion letters of it, and
due to the way it comes together – by the mysterious (from a biological
point of view) business of sex – it is unique to you. Not only is this
genetic fingerprint yours alone, it’s unlike any of the other 107
billion people who have ever lived.”
Perhaps to drive
home this point, Rutherford serves up a crash course on the side in
understanding gene studies, involving genome sequencing, DNA, genomes,
alleles, chromosomes and more. To understand the gene, time travel is a
must. After all, out of the six homo species, only ours has survived, having emerged some 30,000 years ago. The others were on earth for about 2 million years.
Rutherford
explains that the simple chain of “monkey-ape to ape-man, to man-ape”
is an untruth. The first in a series of untruths that he illuminates in
the book. His other bone of contention is “the culturally ubiquitous
idea that genes are fate, and a certain type of any one gene will
determine exactly what an individual is like.”
All those myths
As
the writer shuffles the deck of the cards we have been dealt, the
realisation that ours might not be the first technological and cultural
species gains currency. Cave paintings have in fact been attributed to
Neanderthals by some. And, lest we contest our brutish selves, there is a
theory that we perhaps hunted and made a meal of Neanderthals as well.
But the beautiful irony of nature is such that some of us do carry
Neanderthal genes.
Rutherford’s explanation of how 107 billion
human beings came to inhabit different corners of the world goes up
against the concept of race. He writes: “The latest analyses incorporate
the fact that the current residents of a geographical area are not
necessarily very good representatives of the residents of the deep past.
Today’s Siberians are more like East Asians, but the ancient Siberians
were more like Native Americans, mixed in with some northern Eurasian.”
Identifying races, then, is pretty much like creating patterns in a
star-studded sky.
Another wrong turn in our understanding of
things, argues Rutherford, might be based on personal genome analysis,
which has become a cheap and easily accessible service. The writer is at
pains to point out that possession of certain genes cannot and do not
guarantee you will contract a particular disease. It can only speak of
your likelihood of falling prey to it, with the odds being calculated by
comparing your score with the average.
The 3 billion letters of our DNA are ready to be read, but how they need to be read is an important question, warns Rutherford.
Where do we go from here?
The
next question Rutherford tackles is: “Are we still evolving?” We aren’t
inching towards the X-Men, he reasons, but we are certainly mutating.
Vaishyas in South India are cited as proof, as seen in the abnormal reaction to many members of this “caste” to anaesthesia, ranging from no result to even death. Rutherford explains:
“By
looking into their genomes, we learnt of a single change – a random
switching of a single letter of the gene encoding the enzyme
butyrylcholinesterase (BCHE), which normally helps degrade molecules in
the blood similar to the anaesthetic.”
The startling fact that is
this realignment of the allele – the form, dominant or recessive, in
which a gene exists in an individual – in the Vaishya bloodline began at
least 1,900 years ago. For better or worse, it appears, we are a
species on the move.
On the lighter side, Rutherford offers scoops
on the Human Genome Project (which mapped each and every gene in the
human genome from both a physical and a functional perspective). For
instance, scientists placed bets in a bar on the number of genes human
beings would turn out to have as determined by the project. Rutherford’s
quirky humour is often tucked away in the footnotes, throwing up
delightful nuggets of information, such as the whimsical scientific
names of certain species – “gorilla gorilla” is a scientific name, as is
“extra extra” for a certain mollusc)
The appeal of this
essentially scientific book lies in its ability to both inspire and
provoke thought, thanks to Rutherford’s unique, rather poetic view of
genetics. When a writer says, “You carry an epic poem in your cells,”
the reader has no choice but to pay attention. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories In Our Genes, Adam Rutherford, W&N.
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here.
We welcome your comments at
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More recent research by Morgan et al. (1997) employed seismic reflection
data from the offshore portion of the crater to obtain a clearer picture
of the crater's shape and size. The transient crater, or hole from the initial
impact (fig.3), appears to have been 85 km in diameter, caused by a 10-14
km meteor. The overall crater would have included three rings: a peak ring
80 km in diameter, a 130 km inner ring, and a 195 km outer ring. When newly
formed, this structure would have resembled other multi-ringed craters, as
on Venus, Mercury, Europa,
or the Moon. Beads of altered green glass called tektites probably
related to the formation of Chicxulub Crater have also been found in Belize
480 km from the crater (Ocampo and Pope 1998). Similar tektites, formed
from the heat of the Chicxulub impact, are scattered as far afield
as Haiti and north Mexico.
impact, volcanism were one-two punch for dinosaurs
NOTICE
THE INFLECTION POINT, OF A RE-ORIENTATION OF AT LEAST 30 DEGREES- OF
TRANSFORMS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN, JUST BELOW THE 90E RIDGE (THE PATH OF
THE SUBCONTINENT, BEFORE COLLISION TO FORM THE HIMALAYAS):
