The University of Texas-Austin has now confirmed the theory of extinction of dinosaurs being brought about by asteroids upon finding hard, irrefutable evidence. These are about hundreds of feet of rocks that filled the impact craters within the 24 hours after the first impact in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
The conclusion is, therefore, sixty-five million years ago, the earth was struck by an asteroid with a power equivalent of 10 billion atomic bomb size used in the second world war. The life form on earth was obliterated and dinosaurs were wiped out.
The asteroid is believed to have hit in what is in modern days Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. For over 180 million years, life had existed seamlessly and was dominated by diverse reptiles which included carnivores, herbivores and the over 40 meters tall bipedal were intermingling freely with other reptiles such as the sea dinosaurs and the winged reptiles which ruled the skies.
The impact of the asteroid was so big that it wildfires engulfing thousands of miles. This resulted in a high concentration of sulfur in our atmosphere which had a huge impact on climate change. What followed is a very drastic cooling of the earth’s atmosphere almost instantly dooming the dinosaurs which had roamed and dominated the earth for eternity. These events have been hypothesized as the primary cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The core samples used in this study were found to contain charcoal and jumbles of rocks that are believed to have been brought about by the tsunami backflow. Interesting enough, the study did not find any traces of sulfur in the rocks.
Forest fires contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs
Sean Gulick, a researcher at the University of Texas is quoted as saying
It’s an expanded record of events we were able to recover from within ground zero.
He described the short-lived inferno where the asteroid impact occurred. It is also of importance to note that these events were followed by a prolonged period of global cooling. In either way, the impact from the asteroid started by burning them and then freezing them and this reduced their chances of survival greatly.
The research has also expansively dealt with how forest fires contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Charcoal was found at the place of impact, providing further evidence of the said fires. This fires spread over thousands of miles away reaching inland in places such as Illinois which is over 500 miles away from the point of impact.
The most important part of this research is the discovery that there were no traces of sulfur in the impact area. However, it was also found out that there were huge traces of sulfur in the surrounding areas from where the impact was.
This meant that the theory about the asteroid impact vaporized the sulfur-bearing minerals present at the impact site and released it into the atmosphere was true and this resulted in sun rays being reflected away from the planet cooling the planet. The research goes further by estimating that 325 billion metric tons of sulfur.
Implications for non-dinosaurs
The real killer, therefore, has got to be the atmospheric changes that occurred after the impact. This consensus is held true by professor Gulic who was quoted as saying that it was the only logical explanation able to explain the events that occurred in that fateful time period.
In recent years, just 5% of global funding has gone on protection, but 2018 has seen climate impacts hit hard, with heatwaves and wildfires in Europe and California and huge floods in India, Japan, and east Africa. “We are already seeing the devastating impact of climate change,” Georgieva told the Guardian. “We strongly believe that action ought to go both on mitigation and adaptation.”
If the current rash of news about asteroids hitting the earth would be taken seriously, then just think about our puny civilization being decimated instantly with the same powerful “nuclear-like” blast which made the dinosaurs extinct.
