Dinosaurs Wiped Out By SOOT After Giant Asteroid Crashed Into Earth, Say Scientists

New research suggests the asteroid impact spread soot across the globe when it hit 66 million years ago

Japanese scientists say soot could have sent temperatures plummeting

Dinosaurs were wiped out when soot from a massive asteroid impact triggered droughts, global cooling and almost killed off plant life, according to new research.

Scientists believe that the effect of an asteroid impact 66 million years ago led to a colossal injection of soot into the atmosphere which eventually led to the demise of the dinosaurs.

The impact, which caused the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater, spread soot across the globe.

Although it has been generally accepted that the impact is what caused dinosaurs ’ demise, the exact process has not been particularly well understood.

In other words, they’d figured out the killer, but not the murder weapon.

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Reuters

The asteroid crash has been known about for some time

But Professor Kunio Kaiho and his team at Tohoku University in Japan analysed sedimentary organic molecules from two places - Haiti, which is close to the impact site, and Spain, which is not.

They found that the impact layer of both areas have the same composition of combusted organic molecules showing high energy.

This, they believe, is the soot from the asteroid crash.

By calculating the amount of soot, a strong, light-absorbing aerosol, the team were able to estimate global climate changes .

Earlier theories suggested that dust from the impact may have blocked the sun, or that sulphates may have contaminated the atmosphere.

But researchers say it is unlikely that either phenomenon could have lasted long enough to have driven the extinction.

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The asteroid is thought to have triggered sudden and rapid climate change

The new hypothesis raised by Kaiho’s team says that soot had caused a prolonged period of darkness that led to a drop in temperature.

According to their study, when the asteroid hit the oil-rich region of Chicxulub, a massive amount of soot was ejected which then spread globally.

The soot aerosols caused colder climates at mid-high latitudes, and drought with milder cooling at low latitudes on land.

This in turn led to the slowing down of photosynthesis in oceans in the first two years, followed by surface-water cooling in oceans in subsequent years.

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This rapid climate change is believed to be behind the loss of land and marine creatures over several years, suggesting that rapid global climate change can and did play a major role in driving extinction.

Now Prof Kaiho’s team is studying other mass extinctions in the hopes of further understanding the processes behind them.

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