Plot the ages of major extinctions against those of flood basalt events and you will get a straight line graph for six co-occurrences since 250 Ma, with very little error. Although the exact mechanism for mass death of species and families is argued over interminably, for those six, flood basalt events have to be deeply implicated. There again, every geologist and their aunties dispute the mechanisms behind monster basalt effusions that bury whole landscapes beneath flow after flow and create very distinctive landforms. When they are eroded they form regularly stepped mountain sides, hence their formerly popular name trap basalts, after the Swedish word trappa meaning staircase. There is a hint of cyclicity in their age distribution. But most important of all, no-one has witnessed these vast, pulsating events, the last having mantled the surroundings of the Columbia and Snake River catchments in the US states of Oregon and Washington between 14-17 Ma ago in the Middle Miocene. Some mark episodes of continental break-up, such as those flanking the Central Atlantic at the time of the end-Triassic (~200 Ma) mass extinction, while others are associated with hot spots, such as the Deccan Traps of western India erupted between 60-68 Ma as India drifted over the Reunion hot-spot and those of the Ethiopian highlands (30 Ma) associated with the Afar hot spot.
A common geochemical feature is beginning to emerge concerning the mantle from which the basalts were partially melted. Six sets of flood basalts exhibit the same trace-element and isotopic (Nd, Pb, Hf and He) characteristics, which suggest that their source had been little effected by previous extraction of crust-forming magmas; it is primitive and may be a relic of the original mantle formed at about 4500 Ma shortly after the catastrophic collision between the early Earth and a wandering Mars-sized planet that flung off the Moon (Jackson, M.G. & Carlson, R.W. 2011. An ancient recipe for flood basalt genesis. Nature, online (27 July 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10326). Although undepleted, the chemistry of the mantle source, worked out by back-calculation from that of the flood basalts, is not the same as the once-postulated original accretion of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites: conceivably a result of the chemical reworking when the Moon formed and the remaining Earth was probably molten from top to centre. The important feature is that the recast chemistry is rich in heat-producing elements compared with the source of ‘common-or-garden’ basalts that continually contribute to the ocean floors and island arcs. Wherever the relic mantle is, it is capable of heating itself, over and above the heating from the core and surrounding mantle, and thus likely to generate thermal and material plumes rising through the mantle.
Preceding the work of Jackson and Carlson, another group discovered that when flood basalt events since the Carboniferous are restored to their former geographic positions at the time they were erupted, they cluster above what are now two patches of more ductile mantle close to the cure-mantle boundary (Torsvik, T.H. et al. 2010. Diamonds sampled by plumes from the core–mantle boundary. Nature, v. 466, p. 352–355). If that is the source of basalt flood-forming plumes, then it is still there and, aside from giant impacts with extra-terrestrial projectiles, the most catastrophic upheavals of the Earth system inevitably will continue, perhaps in the next few million years.
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