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A verneshot (named after French author Jules Verne) is a hypothetical volcanic eruption event caused by the buildup of gas deep underneath a craton. Such an event may be forceful enough to launch an extreme amount of material from the crust and mantle into a sub-orbital trajectory. == Connection with mass extinctions == Verneshots have been proposed as a causal mechanism explaining the statistically unlikely contemporaneous occurrence of continental flood basalts, mass extinctions, and "impact signals" (such as planar deformation features, shocked quartz, and iridium anomalies) traditionally considered definitive evidence of hypervelocity impact events.〔 (First submitted 17 April 2003). For an informal introduction ''see'' (Professor Jason Phipps Morgan's faculty biography ) at Cornell University from May 2004: "I became interested in the causes of mass-extinctions, in particular worrying about the 'too-many-coincidences' problem that these periods appear to be associated (if we believe what's published in the mainstream literature) with BOTH extremely rare continental flood basalts and continental rifting, and even rarer 'impact signals' commonly presumed to come from large extraterrestrial bolide impacts. Our recently published Verneshot hypothesis is our best guess on how to explain these coincidences in a self-consistent causal manner."〕 The verneshot theory suggests that mantle plumes may cause heating and the buildup of carbon dioxide gas underneath continental lithosphere. If continental rifting occurs above this location, an explosive release of the built up gas may occur, potentially sending out a column of crust and mantle into a globally dispersive, super-stratospheric trajectory. It is unclear whether such a column could stay coherent through this process, or whether the force of this process would result in it shattering into much smaller pieces before impacting. The pipe through which the magma and gas had travelled would collapse during this process, sending a shockwave at hypersonic velocity that would deform the surrounding craton. A verneshot event is likely to be related to nearby continental flood basalt events, which may occur before, during or after the verneshot event. This may help in searching for evidence for the results of verneshot events; however, it is also quite probable that most of such evidence will be buried underneath the basalt flows, making investigation difficult. J. Phipps Morgan and others have suggested that subcircular Bouguer gravity anomalies recognized beneath the Deccan Traps may indicate the presence of verneshot pipes related to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.〔 If the Deccan Traps were the location of a verneshot event at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, the strong iridium spike at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary could be explained by the iridium-rich nature in volatiles of the Reunion mantle plume, which is currently beneath Piton de la Fournaise, but during the end Cretaceous was located beneath India in the area of the Deccan Traps; the verneshot event could potentially distribute the iridium globally.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Verneshot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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