Did a Jurassic Magma Plume Burst Through the Earth in Ancient Africa?
About 180 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the planet, a giant plume of molten rock may have punched its way through Earth, knocking the continents aside and incinerating everything in its path.
That’s the secret that may lurk in a set of strange stones from Mozambique. The new findings could settle a longstanding debate about what caused the ancient volcanic cataclysm. .
There are scars all over our planet from enormous and deadly volcanic eruptions like this Jurassic period disaster. Many of these epic eruptions may have been responsible for mass extinctions hundreds of millions of years ago. But, geologists couldn’t agree on what causes any of these calamities; scientists have proposed two possible explanations, and until now, neither one has been proven.
One possibility is that tectonic plates were simply ripped apart: One continent drifted north, another, south. Through the gash that opened between them there burbled a great flow of lava that scorched the land. ...
The other possibility is that lava is the cause of the whole disaster: A plume of magma rose from deep inside the planet and burst through to the surface.
Early evidence from these Mozambique stones supports the second theory, according to a new paper to be published in the December issue of the journal Lithos. ...
