It seems like millions of years ago there were lots of really active volcanos. Why is that no longer the case?
In: Planetary Science
We tend to compress the events of the past because we can’t comprehend the time scales. For example, so many people use the phrase “the age of dinosaurs”, making it sound like a period that lasted a few hundred years with all dinosaurs coexisting. In fact, non-bird dinosaurs lived between about 245 and 66 million years ago (a period of almost 180 million years). In other words, the earliest and last dinosaurs were farther apart from each other than the last ones were are from us. Most dinosaur species that people recognise didn’t even coexist because they were millions of years apart.
It’s a similar thing with your question. Those volcanoes erupted over a very vast period
nowadays, there are more than 1500 active volcanoes on Earth
and around 50–70 volcanoes erupt every year
now multiply THAT number with *”millions of years”*
and you see that it’s easy to *think* there were
many more vulcano’s erupting back then
I wonder if you mean like the volcanic trap activity that was involved in mass extinction events in the past? I think there’s speculation that they could be linked to large impact events, which we haven’t had in a bit, so that could possibly be one reason.
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