Lead researcher Dr Qiang Jiang, a Curtin PhD graduate from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings were vital to understanding how to prevent future climate disasters.
Lead researcher Dr Qiang Jiang, a Curtin PhD graduate from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings were vital to understanding how to prevent future climate disasters.
“Earth’s biological cycle has been punctuated by catastrophic mass extinctions, some of which wiped out 90% of all species,” Dr Jiang said.
“The main culprit of these rapid environmental crises were massive volcanic eruptions. What had been puzzling scientists is that some of these gigantic eruptions resulted in severe extinctions, while others only resulted in minor environmental disturbances. We set out to discover why.
“An example of a less-deadly supervolcano is the Kerguelen large volcanic province- an enormous body of lava in the southern Indian Ocean three times the size of France. Its sheer area and volume makes it the second largest series of super volcanic eruptions since complex life began on Earth some 540 million years ago.
Read more at: Curtin University
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