About 66 million years ago, 70 percent of all the species that existed at the time, including the non-avian dinosaurs, became extinct in an apocalypse widely thought to have been caused by a meteor or comet impact on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. At approximately the same time, a series of volcanic eruptions in Western India produced torrents of lava that discharged large amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur gas into the atmosphere. Mark Richards reviews these remarkable events and explains a radical new theory suggesting they may be causally related. He also discusses how ongoing research is shedding new light on the true cause(s) of the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction.
Presented in collaboration with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Recorded February 3, 2015