Scientists reveal details of the most dangerous day in Earth's history

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A research team led by scientists from the University of Texas (UT) has been able to present a description, which is the most accurate to date, for the first hours after a comet 80 kilometers in diameter collided with Earth about 65 million years ago in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, causing the extinction of three quarters of life on Earth. , Including dinosaurs.

Rock fingerprints
In order to reach these results, the research team, over several years, dug down the ocean water at a depth of about one and a half kilometers, and then examined the sequence of rocks from the bottom up to study the changes that occurred from the first moments of the collision to the modern era.

To understand the idea, rocks can be conceived as an honest fingerprint holder. The environmental changes surrounding the rocks imprint a fingerprint on it, and that footprint remains in it, and scientists can monitor it and learn about the nature of the world at that time, from the point of view of an observer who lived through it.

The findings, published in the September 9 issue of BNS, say that the first moments of the collision were followed by a massive tsunami of several hundred meters, which caused the tsunami to flood the crash site with tons of rock and other materials. Which were recorded in the first classes after the explosion, which is what scientists began to study to reach those results.

The rock composition and degree of melting indicated that the initial collision was 10 billion nuclear bombs, while the first tsunamis struck in a circle that covered nearly half of the North American continent.

Suffocating gases
According to the new study, the observed absence of sulfur in these rocks extracted from the collision zone means that it evaporated because of the explosion, and researchers estimated the amount of sulfur evaporated by about 325 metric tons, which indicated that the explosion released enough sulfur to prevent sunlight from entering Earth's atmosphere over five years.

These findings confirm previous studies that the extinction that took place 65 million years ago, called the "extinction of the Cretaceous Triumvirate", was due to the effects of this huge collision, and scientists are likely to be the cause is precisely coming from sulfur oxides that poisoned the atmosphere for several years, It was followed by the impact of volcanoes, which increased the levels of sulfur in the atmosphere and eliminated additional amounts of life.