We all know that a massive asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago. That enormous space rock caused the dinosaur mass extinction. That would’ve been the fifth mass extinction in Earth’s history. In new research, scientists from the University of Texas at Austin tried to explain how the event had happened. And they came up with a reliable answer to that question.
The researchers explored hundreds of feet of rocks of the Chicxulub crater caused by the dinosaur-killing space rock when it impacted the Earth. Those samples contained charcoal.
“They are all part of a rock record that offers the most detailed look yet into the aftermath of the catastrophe that ended the Age of Dinosaurs. It’s an expanded record of events that we were able to recover from within ground zero. It tells us about the impact processes from an eyewitness location,” explained Sean Gulick from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).
Dinosaurs’ Mass Extinction Due To Massive Asteroid Explained In Details By Scientists
The new research comes with new results over the previous studies. The 10-mile-wide Chicxulub asteroid that impacted the Earth in the Gulf of Mexico pressured the rocks by approximately 6 miles below the surface of our planet. “Just one day deposited about 425 feet of material — a rate that’s among the highest ever encountered in the geologic record,” scientists wrote in their study issued in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This breakneck rate of accumulation means that the rocks record what was happening in the environment within and around the crater in the minutes and hours after impact and give clues about the longer-lasting effects of the impact that wiped out 75% of life on the planet,” scientists added.
As per the new study, the massive asteroid vaporized sulfur-bearing minerals and sent those chemicals to the atmosphere, causing a killing climate change phenomenon. The impact triggered “global climate change that caused a mass extinction, killing off the dinosaurs along with most other life on the planet at the time. The real killer has got to be atmospheric,” said Sean Gulick from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG)
