How's this for global climate change
Jan. 12th, 2009 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cryowizardEver heard of Siberian Traps?
Apparently, 250 million years ago a mantle plume came up from the planet's core in what is today Siberia and caused a volcanic eruption on a scale that is all but impossible to comprehend by today's standards -- a flood basalt event.
Siberian Traps were the largest volcanic eruption in Earth's last 500 million years.
How about them numbers. The eruption:
Apparently, 250 million years ago a mantle plume came up from the planet's core in what is today Siberia and caused a volcanic eruption on a scale that is all but impossible to comprehend by today's standards -- a flood basalt event.
Siberian Traps were the largest volcanic eruption in Earth's last 500 million years.
How about them numbers. The eruption:
- lasted over a million years continuously at full intensity, coinciding with and perhaps directly contributing to the Great Permian Extinction
- expelled about 4 million cubic kilometers of material, with many individual eruptions bringing 2000 cubic kilometers at a time. For comparison, one of the largest explosive eruptions of the 20th century -- Mt Pinatubo in 1991 -- ejected just 25 cubic kilometers of material, plunging the global temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius the next year;
- covered 2 million square kilometers of surface still visible today with lava 2 kilometers deep
- created the giant Norilsk nickel-copper-palladium deposits, formed in the main magma vents of the Traps.