The Deccan Traps are one of the largest volcanic provinces in
the world. It consists of more than 6,500 feet (>2,000 m) of
flat-lying basalt lava flows and covers an area of nearly
200,000 square miles (500,000 square km) (roughly the size of
the states of Washington and Oregon combined) in west-central
India. Estimates of the original area covered by the lava flows
are as high as 600,000 square miles (1.5 million square km). The
volume of basalt is estimated to be 12,275 cubic miles (512,000
cubic km)(the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens produced 1 cubic
km of volcanic material). The Deccan Traps are flood basalts
similar to the Columbia River basalts of the northwestern United
States. This photo shows a thick stack of basalt lava flows
north of Mahabaleshwar. Photograph by Lazlo Keszthelyi, January
28, 1996. The Deccan basalts may have played a role in the
extinction of the dinosaurs. Most of the basalt was erupted
between 65 and 60 million years ago. Gases released by the
eruption may have changed the glo