Definition
The Deccan Trapps (or Traps) are a volcanic plateau, or a large igneous province located in west-central India. It is generally believed that the traps formed through melting of a large mantle plume beneath the Indian continent. Deccan Trapps are a thick (500–3000 m) and large (1.5 × 10 6 km3) sequence of basaltic lava flows that erupted subaerially and rapidly onto the Indian continent about 67–64 Ma ago. The release of large amounts of sulfur gases during repeated cycles of volcanic eruptions that stand for at least 400,000 years has been at the center of a long-standing casual-link debate on the end of dinosaurs (Cretaceous-Tertiary or KT mass extinction). It has been suggested that Deccan Trapps volcanic activity triggered the mass extinction, independently or in concomitance with the impact of an asteroid in the Yucatan peninsula (the Chicxulub crater) while others suggest that only the Chicxulub impact triggered the mass extinction (e.g., Schulte et al. 2010;...
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References and Further Reading
Chiarenza AA, Farnsworth A, Mannion PD, Lunt DJ, Valdes PJ, Morgan JV, Allison PA (2020) Asteroid impact, not volcanism, caused the end-cretaceous dinosaur extinction. Proc Natl Acad Sci 117:17084
Richards MA, Alvarez W, Self S, Karlstrom L, Renne PR, Manga M, Sprain CJ, Smit J, Vanderkluysen L, Gibson SA (2015) Triggering of the largest Deccan eruptions by the Chicxulub impact. GSA Bull 127:1507–1520
Schulte P and 38 others (2010) The Chicxulub asteroid impact and mass extinction at the cretaceous-paleogene boundary. Science 327:1214–1218
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Arndt, N., Pinti, D.L. (2022). Deccan Trapps. In: Gargaud, M., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_399-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_399-4
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Deccan Trapps- Published:
- 28 December 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_399-4
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Deccan Trapps- Published:
- 28 April 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_399-3