An asteroid struck 66 million years ago in what is now the Gulf of Mexico – with dramatic consequences.
75 percent of all animal and Plant species, including the dinosaurs, died out. A team of researchers now reports in the journal “Nature Communications” that the A hit in the “deadliest angle“and a maximum of climate-changing gases was thrown into the upper atmosphere.
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The traces of the Impact one around ten kilometers long Asteroids on the Mexican peninsula Yucatan at the end of the Cretaceous period there are mostly ocean deposits in the hundreds of meters Gulf of Mexico hidden. In 2016, a team of researchers from twelve countries drilled for the first time in the Ring Mountains (“Peak Ring”) in the center of the roughly 200-kilometer-long, after the Mexican port city Chicxulub named crater.
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NHM characterizes cores
Out Austria is the impact researcher Ludovic Ferrière, curator of the meteorite collection on Natural History Museum (NHM) in Vienna, involved in the drilling project and the evaluation of the drill cores; he is also the co-author of the current work. Together with NHM general director Christian Köberl and the doctoral student Jean-Guillaume Feignon he has characterized the drill cores in detail and, in particular, has estimated the impact pressures generated during the impact.
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With the help of these geophysical data and numerical 3D simulations, among other things, researchers have been around Gareth Collins from Imperial College London reproduced the event. “It is the first 3D simulation of the complete structure and the entire course of the crater formation,” Ferriere told the APA. The three-dimensional simulation shows that the asteroid coming from the northeast in a steep angle from 45 to 60 degrees. The scientists rule out a turning angle of less than 30 degrees.
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The upper layers of earth around the Chicxulub crater contained large amounts of water as well as porous carbonate and evaporite rock. Due to the tremendous energy at A hit much of this material was evaporated and large amounts of carbon dioxide, sulfur and water vapor were thrown into the atmosphere. The decisive factor for the serious consequences was the sulfur, which quickly forms aerosols. These tiny particles blocked the sun’s rays and allowed the climate to cool down quickly.
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Steep impact released greenhouse gases
According to the researchers, the steep impact angle released more climate-effective gases than a flat or almost vertical one A hit. They assume that the impact has likely released billions of tons of sulfur. “The A hit takes place in one of the deadliest angle and the worst-case scenario has occurred for the dinosaurs, ” Collins in a broadcast.
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