Flood basalt hosted palaeosols: Potential palaeoclimatic indicators of global climate change

• There is often a causal link between continental flood basalts climates and mass extinctions.
• Development of palaeosols in most of the flood basalts represents inter-eruptive time intervals.
• These paleosols can help in understanding environmental developments during volcanic activity.

Since continental sediments (in addition to the marine geological record) offer important means of deciphering environmental changes, the sediments hosted by the successive flows of the continental flood basalt provinces of the world should be treasure houses in gathering the palaeoclimatic data. Palaeosols developed on top of basalt flows are potentially ideal for palaeoenvironmental reconstructions because it is easy to determine their protolith geochemistry and also they define a definite time interval. The present paper summarizes the nature of the basalt-hosted palaeosols formed on the flood basalts provinces from different parts of the globe having different ages.

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