Earth's Greatest Extinction Event

In the article titled “Meteor likely caused the Earth’s Greatest Extinction Event” the author states that “About 60 meteorites five or more kilometers across have hit the earth in the past 600 million years. The smallest ones would have carved craters some 95 kilometers wide. “Most scientists agree that one such impact did in the dinosaurs, but evidence for large collisions coincident with other mass extinctions remained elusive until recently.”The increased attention brought about the discovery including extraterrestrial fullerenes found in the Graphite Peak boundary layer. They trap extraterrestrial gases in space and travel to the earth in the meteor. Long before the dinosaurs ever lived, the planet experienced a mass extinction so severe …show more content…
In 1991, a study in Science showed a massive and ancient lava flow in Siberia that was said to be precisely the greatest of extinctions 251 million years ago. The lava did not shoot out of the Earth like a giant volcano, but the molten rock passed slowly for thousands of years. There was excess of lava that it spreaded evenly. It would bury the surface of the Earth under 10 feet of magma.
The second article states that “The researchers arrived at the theory by tying in what is known about the physiology of dinosaurs with recent geological evidence suggesting that from 275 million to 175 million years ago, oxygen levels stayed very low comparable to levels found now at altitudes of 14,000 feet “I believe that death by volcano and death by meteor are not inconsistent with one another. It may very well be the case that all terrestrial life on earth. one instance in which volcanoes had a major impact on dinosaurs but it happened at the end of the triassic period and not during the Cretaceous period.If giant dinosaurs had to breathe in a low-atmosphere environment, then such an efficient breathing system would have given them a survival advantage. Based off the the research it is said that the dinosaurs were in decline anyway and that they just naturally became extinct at or …show more content…
The combination of this volcanic winter, and the massive amounts of toxic gases pumped into the atmosphere was enough to dramatically change the Earth's climate, basically an Ice Age. The ash cloud, coupled with all those greenhouse gases acted like a blanket of sun repellent, not only reflecting the warmth of the sun away, but also prevented UV radiation from entering into the Earth's atmosphere to warm it up. Not only that, but since no sunlight was coming through this huge blanket of ash and gases, no plants were able to grow, and no plants meant no food for the herbivores and death by starvation, and no herbivores meant no food for the carnivores, and death by starvation. That, and the dramatic shift from a warm climate to an arctic climate was what mainly killed off the dinosaurs.
I believe that volcanoes had a role in killing off the dinosaurs indirectly. It was the climate that killed off the dinosaurs. In other words, the dinosaurs froze to death because when the volcano erupted there was so much ash and gases that was pumped into the atmosphere that it literally changed the climate in lower region areas. The volcanic winter was only in most of lower areas of world and that killed off the dinosaurs was on a planetary scale. Half of the volcanoes in the world during that event were pumping out ash and gases at the same