We’ve been wrong this whole time
For most of our lives, we’ve always believed that it was asteroid that responsible for killing off the dinosaurs. However, that isn’t true.
Almost sixty-six million years on from their life-ending saga, scientists at the Royal Observatory of Belgium have been researching what happened and believe they have a different answer.
75 percent of the dinosaur population were wiped out after the Chicxulub asteroid collided with Planet Earth.
The asteroid, said to be anywhere between 11 and 81 kilometres in diameter, was naturally going to cause damage, but, it wasn’t the impact itself that led to the dinosaurs’ death.
Instead, the initial impact caused what scientists are describing as a “mega-tsunami” which created waves of up to a mile high. This also wasn’t the reason why the dinosaurs perished.
Researchers have claimed that the cause of death was “ultrafine dust”, which was released as a result of the asteroid’s impact and lingered within the Earth’s atmosphere for as long as 15 years.
This microscopic dust allegedly played a part when it came to the Earth’s surface cooling down, affected the planet’s photosynthesis for almost two years and therefore killing off large masses of vegetation.
The Royal Observatory of Belgium continued to explain: “The prolonged disruption in photosynthesis constitutes a sufficiently long timescale to pose severe challenges for both terrestrial and marine habitats.
“Biotic groups that were not adapted to survive the dark, cold, and food-deprived conditions for almost two years would have experienced mass extinctions.”
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