Double Disaster For Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs’ extinction was caused by a combined effect of deadly volcanic eruption and asteroid strike, scientists have claimed.

17:08 06 July 2016

It has been long established that dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago when the asteroid slammed into Earth. However, a new study has found that the dire results of the event were due to the combined effect of a deadly volcanic eruption.

 

A team of experts from the Universities of Michigan and Florida reconstructed the Antarctic Ocean temperature from the time of the extinction and found two abrupt warming spikes in ocean temperatures that coincide with massive volcanic eruption in India and the impact of an asteroid or comet on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

 

Sierra Petersen, a postdoctoral researcher in the university's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: 'This new temperature record provides a direct link between the volcanism and impact events and the extinction pulses - that link being climate change,' 

 

We find that the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was caused by a combination of the volcanism and meteorite impact, delivering a theoretical 'one-two punch,'

 

'These two extinction pulses coincide with the two warming spikes we identified in our new temperature record, which each line up with one of the two 'causal events.’