Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 347, Issue 6218, Pages 182-184Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa0118
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Funding
- Department of Geosciences Scott Fund at Princeton University
- U.S. NSF through the Continental Dynamics Program, Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology Program
- Office of International Science and Engineering's India Program [EAR-0447171, EAR-1026271]
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Division Of Earth Sciences [1454430] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The Chicxulub asteroid impact (Mexico) and the eruption of the massive Deccan volcanic province (India) are two proposed causes of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, which includes the demise of nonavian dinosaurs. Despite widespread acceptance of the impact hypothesis, the lack of a high-resolution eruption timeline for the Deccan basalts has prevented full assessment of their relationship to the mass extinction. Here we apply uranium-lead (U-Pb) zircon geochronology to Deccan rocks and show that the main phase of eruptions initiated similar to 250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and that >1.1 million cubic kilometers of basalt erupted in similar to 750,000 years. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the Deccan Traps contributed to the latest Cretaceous environmental change and biologic turnover that culminated in the marine and terrestrial mass extinctions.
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