The phenomenon of crisis in systems evolving in high-dimensional phase space can show unexpected and interesting features. We study this phenomenon in the context of a system of coupled sine circle maps. We establish that the origins of this crisis lie in a tangent bifurcation in high dimensions, and identify the routes that lead to the crisis. Interestingly, multiple routes to crisis are seen depending on the initial conditions of the system, due to the high dimensionality of the space in which the system evolves. The statistical behavior seen in the phase diagram of the system is also seen to change due to the dynamical phenomenon of crisis, which leads to transitions from nonspreading to spreading behavior across an infection line in the phase diagram. Unstable dimension variability is seen in the neighborhood of the infection line. We characterize this crisis and unstable dimension variability using dynamical characterizers, such as finite-time Lyapunov exponents and their distributions. The phase diagram also contains regimes of spatiotemporal intermittency and spatial intermittency, where the statistical quantities scale as power laws. We discuss the signatures of these regimes in the dynamic characterizers, and correlate them with the statistical characterizers and bifurcation behavior. We find that it is necessary to look at both types of correlators together to build up an accurate picture of the behavior of the system. © 2013 American Physical Society.