Determining
why the dinosaurs went extinct has been debated for ages and studied
for even longer. Now, the most acceptable extinction event hypothesis —
that of an astroid impact that changed the Earth’s climate — has a very
interesting new wrinkle. As it turns out, it might not have been the
size of the rock or the actual destruction it wrought that made the
asteroid so utterly devastating, but simply the exact spot where it
slammed into our planet.
Studying
rock samples from up to 1,300 meters beneath the Gulf of Mexico,
researchers were able to get a fantastic look at what the area was like
at the time when the asteroid — estimated to be nearly 10 miles wide —
struck. When the rock slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago, the
area was little more than a shallow sea, and scientists now believe that
the collision sent an enormous amount of sulphur skyward, which
ultimately doomed the planet by sending it into an ice age which the
lumbering prehistoric beasts simply couldn’t endure.
The researchers, who presented their findings in a new BBC documentary called The Day The Dinosaurs Died,
suggest that if the killer asteroid had made a watery splashdown in the
middle of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, the deadly vaporized rock
that blotted out the sun in the days after its impact would have been
far less severe. If that had happened, plant life would still have
gotten the sunlight it needed to survive, and the food chain might have
remained intact. Of course, had that happened, the eventual rise of
mammals may also never have occurred, and we might not even be here to
study any of it at all.
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