Qualla: Deccan Traps

Deccan Traps: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CamArchGrad, Public domain. The word comes from Swedish: trapp, meaning stairs. Fly over western India and you can see why. The landscape descends in enormous terraced steps, each one a layer of solidified lava stacked on the last, the whole formation more than two kilometers thick in places. The Deccan Traps are not a volcano in the conventional sense. They are the remnant of something far larger: a flood basalt eruption that began roughly 66 million years ago and poured lava across an area estimated at 1.5 million square kilometers, approximately half the size of modern India. That timing, coinciding almost exactly with the extinction of the dinosaurs, has fueled one of geology's longest-running debates.

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Image: CamArchGrad | Public domain

Deccan Traps: A Staircase Built by Fire

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shaikh Munir, CC BY-SA 3.0. The numbers are almost incomprehensible. The Deccan Traps currently cover about 500,000 square kilometers of west-central India, reduced from their original extent by millions of years of erosion and the slow grinding of plate tectonics. Their total volume approaches one million ...

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Image: Shaikh Munir | CC BY-SA 3.0

Deccan Traps: The Extinction Question

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rituvinay, CC BY-SA 4.0. Did the Deccan Traps kill the dinosaurs? For decades, some scientists, notably Princeton geologist Gerta Keller, argued that the volcanic gases released during the eruptions played a major role in the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction. Sulfurous emissions could have caused sud...

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Image: Rituvinay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Deccan Traps: Born from a Plume

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kppethe, CC BY 3.0. The engine behind the Deccan Traps was a mantle plume, a column of superheated rock rising from deep within the Earth. The same hotspot is now located beneath Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometers from India, because the Indian tectonic plate has been moving...

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Image: Kppethe | CC BY 3.0

Deccan Traps: The Shiva Crater Mystery

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicholas (Nichalp), CC BY-SA 2.5. Off the west coast of India, a geological structure on the sea floor has been proposed as another impact crater, dated to approximately 66 million years ago. Dubbed the Shiva crater, it would, if confirmed, represent a second major asteroid strike at the time of the extinction. P...

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Image: Nicholas (Nichalp) | CC BY-SA 2.5