About 66 million years ago, oceans acidified and forests burned entirely after the Chicxulub meteorite hit Earth, in the Gulf of Mexico, to be exact. At about the same time, an erupting volcano shared its lava with the Indian subcontinent, thing that led to the formation of the Deccan Traps.
It was one of these two that made the dinosaurs extinct – but not the birds – and it actually meant that the door to the evolutionary mammals was opened until people made their appearance. In fact, we can only imagine what these calamities did by taking a look at the decades that passed. It seems that we know for sure right now what happened.
According to a team of scientists, the meteorite was the one that caused it all, and the volcano took care of the climate change, which overall had an impact on the recovery of the planet after the events.
Pincelli Hull, from the Yale University, stated that “A lot of people have wanted to argue that both the impact and the volcanism mattered in the extinction.” The research was published in the “Science.” What we see now it’s just the impact of the event.
With the help of this research, we can finally see what happened when the dinosaurs died. This comes from Stephen Brusatte, who is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. He did not take part in the research.
This entire project started back in 2020 when Dr. Hull took part in the International Ocean Discovery Program when he set sail aboard the Joides Resolution, which is a research vessel. Together with a team of scientists, she drilled below the North Atlantic into the seafloor in order to retrieve cores that had in their composition old ocean sediment. It’s interesting that one of the cores came from sediment that was close to the wreckage of the Titanic.
