When I was in high school in the depths of the last century, I wrote a term paper on dinosaur extinction theories. The number of conjectures was so long it was easy to achieve the required word count just by listing them! Two that continue to wrestle for top contender involve global climate change caused by either a massive asteroid strike or long-term intensive volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps of India.&nbsp;Many have accepted the asteroid theory, but it now appears the pendulum is swinging back to volcanoes, or so say 128 computer processors.
Writing in the journal Science, computational geologists Alexander Cox and C. Brehnin Keller (Dartmouth College) applied a machine-learning algorithm to a huge number of possible scenarios involving different mixes of volcanic gases. They've found mixes that match the data contained in rocks and fossil forams. Volcanoes actively erupted in India over a period of a million years spanning just before and after dinosaurs went extinct. The computer model shows the amount of volcanic activity is consistent with the amount of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide that could easily have altered the climate enough to doom the dinosaurs as it sent the global climate into seesawing whiplashes of warming and cooling.
While Cox leans decidedly toward a volcanic explanation, he doesn't discount the contribution of an asteroid delivering the final blow as it spread a cloud of debris around an already disturbed globe. In something of an understatement, he's quoted by Matt Simon (a senior staff writer with WIRED) as saying, "the asteroid definitely didn't cheer up the dinosaurs?"

Volcanoes or Asteroids?

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