It’s a mind-boggling thought: what likely happened the day the dinosaurs were wiped off the face of planet Earth?
According to the asteroid impact theory first proposed In 1980, a fireball struck Earth with an estimated explosive yield of more than 100 trillion tons of TNT. The impact was said to penetrate the planet’s crust for several miles deep, forming a crater more than 115 miles across and vaporizing rocks by thousands of cubic miles.
The catastrophe was believed to spur a chain of destructive events around the globe, wiping out 80 percent of life including most dinosaur species.
Reliving The Catastrophe
Just last month, British researchers engaged on a Gulf of Mexico offshore drilling platform got hold of the first core samples from the Chicxulub Crater’s so-called “peak ring.” This ring is where the battered Earth rebounded seconds after the asteroid strike, and its geology can help scientists better understand the impact’s calamitous effects some 66 million years ago.
The key is the “impact calculator” developed by Purdue University and Imperial College London (ICL) researchers, where one can enter the asteroid’s size and speed to get a peek into that fateful event. Here, one can enter varying distances from point of impact to see changing effects.
“If you were close by, say within 1,000 kilometers [625 miles], you would be instantaneously, or within a few seconds, killed by the fireball,” explained Chicxulub project co-lead scientist Joanna Morgan in a National Geographic report.
The scientists also saw that after the angry fire would have come the flood, where the asteroid strike would have created a tsunami up to a thousand feet in height.
The subsequent earthquakes, too, would probably be more potent than anything we can ever imagine: a seismic event akin to all the world’s quakes for the last 160 years simultaneously going off, said seismology expert Rick Aster of the Colorado State University.
Observers out of the explosion’s direct impact, on the other hand, would witness darkening skies and a creepy display of shooting stars from the impact debris. After the meteors burn up as they speed higher and become hotter, the sky would darken like ash, and debris would swirl around Earth to present some creeping twilight.
Gareth Collins, an ICL lecturer who helped develop the program, pointed out what would be near “total darkness” in the first few hours. In the following weeks to months – even years – there would be something between twilight and super cloudy days.
Long-Term Destruction Of Dinosaurs, Life Forms
Note, however, that it was likely the lasting environmental effects that ultimately made the dinosaurs go extinct. The darkness, for instance, drastically reduced photosynthesis, with ash and soot washing out of the atmosphere resulting in rain falling as acidic mud.
Wide-scale fires would have led to staggering amounts of toxic chemicals in the atmosphere, destroying the ozone layer.
The impact’s carbon footprint itself likely released about 10,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide, as well as 100 billion tons of carbon monoxide and 100 billion tons of methane in an instant. From nuclear winter to extreme warming, most life forms suffered to the point of extinction.
The drilling project is hoped to better fill the gaps in this theory and help scientists better understand post-impact climate.
A separate study last May proposed that the specific mass extinction event that eradicated the dinosaurs was just as deadly to Antarctic life. The group of British researchers found that the event at the end of the Cretaceous Period killed up to 70 percent of species residing in the Antarctic back then, contrary to previous thoughts that life in southernmost areas were spared.
The findings showed that polar life was not exactly as resilient to global changes linked to asteroid impacts, as generally assumed because those in the Antarctic are used to erratic food supply and living in darkness for six months at a time.
