The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

“It may be that Chicxulub was the gun and the Deccan Traps were the bullet,” he said. So what would it take to wipe out the dinosaurs, the most dominant animal group on land in the history of the planet and one that ruled the earth for 136 million years? Well, this might do: a climate that was deteriorating at the end of the Cretaceous, with greenhouse heat waves punctuated by brief and bitter winters . . . interrupted by an asteroid the size of San Francisco plowing through the atmosphere in a second, creating Mordor in Mexico, incinerating everything around, sending tsunamis hundreds of miles inland over distant shores, collapsing the eastern seaboard, bringing an age of darkness, failing plankton blooms, foundering food webs, and acid rain, and then . . . on the other side of the world, while the midocean ridges grumbled at the bottom of the ocean, the earth opened up, as it has in only a few catastrophic chapters previously in its history, drowning western India in fire, acidifying the oceans, and bringing punishing warmth to the world for thousands of years. Of course, this remains a speculative sketch. The fact is, we still have no idea what the last days of the dinosaurs were like. The only thing we know is that they were unspeakably awful.