The studies agree that the Deccan Traps eruptions occurred over the course of a million years, beginning about 400,000 years before the mass extinction and continuing for about 500,000 years after.

But the Deccan Traps eruptions, which spewed as much as 500,000 cubic kilometers of lava across much of what’s now western India, also occurred within a million years of the extinction.

For their study, the team measured the amount of CO 2 inside of tiny droplets of frozen magma trapped inside Deccan Traps crystals from the end-Cretaceous time period. They also measured the ...

But about 70 percent of the Deccan Traps lava spewed forth starting within 100,000 years of the impact, said lead study author Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

About sixty-six million years ago a planet-wide catastrophe brought the non-avian dinosaurs to their demise, and the end of the Cretaceous period was marked by a mass extinction of its fauna and flora ...

A series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, not a meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico. The eruptions, which created the gigantic Deccan ...

After looking at nine samples from the Deccan Traps, the team concluded that there were at least four major eruptive pulses, lasting around 100,000 years each time.

The Deccan Traps are one of the biggest volcanic features on Earth. Located in west-central India, they began forming just over 66 million years ago through massive volcanic eruptions.

“Now that we have dated Deccan Traps lava flows in more and different locations, we see that the transition seems to be the same everywhere. I would say, with pretty high confidence, that the ...