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Gas Fluxes from Flood Basalt Eruptions

¹ Volcano Dynamics Group, Department of Earth Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
² Department of Geology and Geophysics
University of Hawai'i at Mnoa
1680 East-West Road, Honolulu HI 96822, USA

Correspondence: Corresponding author: Stephen.Self{at}open.ac.uk

Subaerial continental flood basalt volcanism is distinguished from all other volcanic activity by the repeated effusion of huge batches of basaltic magma (10²-10³ km³ per eruption) over short periods of geologic time (<1 Myr). Flood basalt provinces are constructed of thick stacks of extensive pahoehoe-dominated lava flow fields and are the products of hundreds of eruptions. Each huge eruption comes from a dyke-fed fissure tens to hundreds of kilometres long and lasts about a decade or more. Such spatial and temporal patterns of lava production do not occur at any other time in Earth history, and, during eruptions, gas fluxes of 1 Gt per year of SO₂ and CO₂ over periods of a decade or more are possible. Importantly, the atmospheric cooling associated with aerosols generated from the SO₂ emissions of just one flood basalt eruption is likely to have been severe and would have persisted for a decade or longer. By contrast, warming due to volcanogenic CO₂ released during an eruption is estimated to have been insignificant because the mass of CO₂ would have been small compared to that already present in the atmosphere.

KEYWORDS: flood basalt volcanism, eruption volumes, gas release, atmospheric impact

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