Imagine the basalt lava floods gushing from long volcanic fissures and fire fountains rather than volcanic mountains. Imagine plumes of toxic gases spewing from 3 to 11 km up into the sky. While these enormous basalt floods formed a plateau some 164K square km up to 3,500 m deep, this flood of magma turned lava turned basalt is dwarfed by even larger prehistoric basalt floods in what is today’s India and Siberia, among other place. These enormous emissions of fumes, gases, and smoke from burned areas affected climate and wildlife on a global level. Then imagine not all that long ago huge Ice Age dams breaking loose so vast lakes emptied out to inundate and scour these canyons, filling them up with raging floodwaters. Imagine the scale of these repetitive catastrophes. Wow.