A team of scientists at Dartmouth College has used an innovative computer model to analyze the cause of the mass extinction event that ended the age of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The model, which used machine learning to work through over 300,000 possible scenarios, suggested that massive volcanic eruptions in India's Deccan Traps could have been sufficient to trigger the global extinction.
The model calculated over 300,000 possible scenarios of carbon dioxide emissions, sulfur dioxide emissions, and biological productivity in the 1 million years before and after the K-Pg extinction event. The traps erupted about 300,000 years before the Chicxulub asteroid. The model operated in reverse, analyzing the aftereffects of the extinction to decipher its origins.
However, the asteroid impact hypothesis was first proposed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter Alvarez in the early 1980s. They discovered a layer of iridium, an element rare on Earth's surface but abundant in meteorites, around the world in sedimentary rocks precisely at the K-Pg boundary. The asteroid, estimated to be about 10 kilometers in diameter, released energy equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs, triggering a series of environmental disasters. The post-impact environment provided evolutionary opportunities for mammals.
The findings were published in the journal Science. The study has sparked a new debate in the scientific community about the cause of the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. While the asteroid impact theory has been widely accepted for decades, this new research suggests that volcanic activity may have played a more significant role than previously thought.