Mumbai’s skyline stands atop Deccan Trap basalt formed during one of Earth’s largest volcanic episodes, which occurred around the same time as the asteroid impact linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The hypothesis remains debated among geologists and has not been proven. Whether the asteroid alone wiped out the dinosaurs, or whether Deccan volcanism dealt a compounding blow, remains an open question in palaeontology. What is settled is that Mumbai’s dark, layered rock is a direct physical remnant of one of the most consequential periods in the planet’s history.
The entire western tract of Maharashtra is built from basaltic lava flows known as the Deccan Traps, dated to around 67.4 million years ago, and these layered flood basalts are more than 2,000 metres thick in places, covering some 500,000 square kilometres. The paper found that the impact could have generated seismic energy dense enough to reach through the upper 200 kilometres of Earth’s mantle, potentially enough to trigger volcanic eruptions worldwide.
At almost the same time, on the other side of the world, western India was in the grip of one of the largest volcanic events in Earth’s history, according to another research published in ScienceDirect titled Deccan Traps . The closeness of the timing has intrigued scientists for years, according to a report by Geological Society of America. In 2015, a team led by UC Berkeley researcher Mark Richards examined the “uncomfortably close” occurrence of the Chicxulub impact and the largest phase of the Deccan Traps eruptions, and argued this was unlikely to be coincidence.
Crucially though, the same paper acknowledged that Deccan volcanism was already under way well before the impact, and that a direct melting effect from Chicxulub could not by itself explain the coincidence.
