The Deccan Traps erupt
India crosses a hotspot and floods half a million square kilometres in basalt, straddling the extinction.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 900 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 thousand years
- Era
- Cretaceous, Mesozoic
As the Indian plate passes over the Reunion plume, flood basalts pour out across western India, building lava piles over two kilometres thick and covering an area the size of France. The main eruptive phase brackets the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, which is why Deccan volcanism has long been the rival explanation for the extinction. The current picture is more entangled: high-precision dating shows eruption rates jumping sharply within tens of thousands of years of the impact, and the seismic energy of Chicxulub has been proposed as the cause of that jump.