Why dinosaurs lacked a few seconds to survive
If fallen 66 million years ago an asteroid flew to Earth for a minute sooner or later, the dinosaurs would still be alive, scientists say.
Scientists who have studied the Chicxulub crater that occurred 66 million years ago in the fall of the asteroid, has shed light on why the dinosaurs became extinct so rapidly.
This is the opening tells released recently television film bi-Bi-si “the Day the dinosaurs died”.
Researchers studying the crater, took samples of rocks that lie under the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in the fall of the asteroid.
Scientists assembled the material sheds new light on the events that occurred on Earth at the turn of the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods.
It turned out that a giant asteroid measuring about 15 km in diameter, which crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, at the worst place and time to land on our planet to find a way just could not.
Coastal waters here are shallow, which means that in the atmosphere were emitted huge quantities of sulphur released from the mineral clay.
The result after the fiery storm erupting after the fall of the celestial body, began a long period of “global winter”.
But if the asteroid landed in a different place, the result could be quite different.
“The irony is that in the end cause the extinction of the dinosaurs was not the size of the asteroid, not the strength of his blow and not even the global consequences of this cataclysm. The reason was the place where it struck,” says Ben Garrod, one of the leading film “the Day the dinosaurs died”.
If an asteroid fell a few tens of seconds earlier or later it would collapse not in the shallow coastal waters and deep ocean.
The fall in the Atlantic or the Pacific would have meant the evaporation of a much smaller number of rocks and deadly calcium sulfate, escaped from the Earth from asteroid impact.
A suspension would have been much less dense, and the sun’s rays penetrated to the Earth’s surface. This means that occurred when a global cataclysm of nature could have been avoided.
“In that cold, dark world in the ocean food over during the week, and after a short time — and on land. When the planet was no food left for the dinosaurs, they have very little chance of survival,” explains Ben Garrod.
During drilling near the crater rocks were recovered from depths up to 1300 meters.
The deepest rocks were mined in the so-called “Queen of the ring” — radial stone ridge inside the crater.
These stone rocks were the most severely deformed monstrous pressure incurred upon impact.
The team conducted the drilling of researchers under the leadership of professors Joe Morgan and Sean Gulika hoped by analyzing the received material, more details to reconstruct the asteroid and the ensuing changes in the environment.
Chicxulub crater: the impact that changed life on Earth celestial body with a diameter of about 15 km punched a hole in the earth’s crust with a width of 100 km and a depth of 30 km. the Formed Cup is then imploded, leaving a crater with a diameter of about 200 km and a depth of several kilometers. The center of the crater rose again and again, the donkey, leaving the inner ring. Today most of the crater is hidden under the coastal waters, below 600 meters of shelf sediments On land, the crater is hidden under layers of limestone, but its rim can be seen in the form of an arc of the funnel-shaped recesses.
Scientists estimate that the energy released in the formation of the crater, was approximately equal to the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs similar to that dropped on Hiroshima.
Now they understand how it is formed strain of the breed that we see. In addition, researchers are studying how within a few years after the fall of the asteroid on this place started to come back to life.
Other leading film “the Day the dinosaurs died” Alice Roberts went to the quarry of the U.S. state of new Jersey, where it was found about 25 thousand fossils of living creatures is evidence of mass extinction of animals who are victims of this cataclysm on the day of the asteroid.
“All of these fossils are deposited in layer not more than 10 inches thick,” says paleontologist Ken Lacovara.
“They died instantly and were quickly buried. It was a moment of geological time. It’s days, weeks, maybe months. But it does not thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands of years. It is, in fact, a one — time event,” says the scientist.