The Earth’s crust that covers the liquid mantle beneath is very thin, literally like a sheet of soggy newspaper floating in a bathtub of very hot water. When asteroids crash into Earth from space, they may do more than raise dust and cause dinosaurs to go extinct. They could blast right through the Earth’s crust into the molten mantle and cause gigantic volcanos to erupt as well. “A large impact has the ability to cause instant melting where it hits, creating its own impact plume in the mantle and resulting in a massive surge of lava spilling out,” says Adrian Jones of computer simulation results published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Such an event may have occured 65 million years ago when the 10 kilometre-wide asteroid that hit Chicxulub in Mexico and supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. In fact, that asteroid is now theorized to have been a only a piece from a much bigger rock that hit India, triggering the surge of volcanic activity known as the Deccan Traps. “Many areas that exhibit extensive volcanism from the past, such as the Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps, may in fact be sites of gigantic meteorite impacts,” says Jones.