The Press Stories
Thought you had a bad day? Dinosaurs – and in general (almost) all life on Earth – 66 million years ago, whenA giant asteroid has arrived Hitting the planet at its worst.
That’s because the ball of rock we’re standing on lasted only a few hours before the sun turned: two new studies have shown exactly what they believe. The longer the evidence of disasters, the more terrifying.
We learned some of the consequences of this asteroid’s fallout—precisely the type of deadly rock that NASA has It tried to destroy it with its DART mission– On the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, at the location indicated The famous Chicxulub Crater.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, acidification of the oceans, a veil of dust that blocks the sun, and the collapse of entire food chains: all this led to almost all extinction, scientists say. Non-avian dinosaursAnd 93% of mammals were thriving quietly until then.
Two studies including Broadcast by New Atlas, mention some of these phenomena. First The work of University of Michigan scientistsModelers of tsunamis caused by that material compared them with geological data from one hundred and twenty sites around the world.
They relied on earlier data, which indicated that the 14-kilometer-wide asteroid would have hit Earth at 43,200 km/h. According to their models, a wall of water 4.5 kilometers high would have formed in the first minutes following the impact, before falling heavily to the surface.
Ten minutes after the shock, a giant circular tsunami, a terrifying height of 1.5 kilometers, is said to have started its destructive journey. With an unimaginable force, it would have taken only twenty-four hours to sweep the entire surface of the globe.
According to scientists and geospatial verifications of their simulations, the South Atlantic, North Pacific, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean regions were slightly less affected, while the North Atlantic and South Pacific were hit hardest.
Note the bumps
There was a second study Led by Herman Bermudez from Montclair State University in New Jersey. Hermann Bermudez was interested in geological effects Cretaceous-Paleogene extinctionAnalyzing the Composition of Outcrops in ColombiaGorgonilla IslandIn Mexico and the United States, in Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi.
On the island of Gorgonilla, 3,000 kilometers from the Chicxulub crater, Columbian discovered disturbances in the sediments, which he assumed were the result of earthquakes immediately after the impact.
is also He invented the glass spheresSmall spheres of glass, melted by the force of the impact, are projected skyward and then fall to the ground, as well Tektites and micro tektites.
As the New Atlas explains, this spherical layer took several months to form. However, it is marked by the disintegration of the upper layer of sediments – mud and sand – mentioned earlier: according to Herman Bermudez, this is evidence that the earthquakes that followed the impact of the asteroid did not stop for weeks. If not months.
Terribly long, the tremors would have been unimaginably powerful. The researcher calculates that after the asteroid impact, the planet would have been hit by an earthquake of magnitude 10.23 Jules. It is 50,000 times more than that It breached the Indian Ocean in 2004. With a magnitude of 9.1 on the Richter scale, it killed more than 220,000 people.
