The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) is defined by tholeiitic basalts that crop out in once-contiguous parts of North America, Europe, Africa, and South America and is associated with the breakup of Pangea. 40Ar/39Ar and paleomagnetic data indicate that CAMP magmatism extended over an area of 2.5 million square kilometers in north and central Brazil, and the total aerial extent of the magmatism exceeded 7 million square kilometers in a few million years, with peak activity at 200 million years ago. The magmatism coincided closely in time with a major mass extinction at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

The evolution of life on Earth is marked by catastrophic extinction events, one of which occurred ca. 200 Ma at the transition from the Triassic Period to the Jurassic Period (Tr-J boundary), apparently contemporaneous with the eruption of the world's largest known continental igneous province, the Central Atlantic magmatic province. The temporal relationship of the Tr-J boundary and the province's volcanism is clarified by new multi-disciplinary (stratigraphic, palynologic, geochronologic, paleomagnetic, geochemical) data that demonstrate that development of the Central Atlantic magmatic province straddled the Tr-J boundary and thus may have had a causal relationship with the climatic crisis and biotic turnover demarcating the boundary

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