Roughly 66 million years ago an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula. New research shows darkness, not cold, likely drove a mass extinction after the impact. Credit: NASA
The CBC Radio show/Podcast Quirks and Quarks has a segment entitled "Darkness doomed the dinosaurs — the extinction asteroid turned out the lights on Earth". They speak with Peter Roopnarine from the California Academy of Sciences about the after effects of the meteor strike that took out the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.
When the dino-killing asteroid struck 66 million years ago, our planet was plunged into an extended period of darkness. New research, presented at the recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, and led in part by Peter Roopnarine from the California Academy of Sciences, looks at how that darkness would have affected global ecosystems in the days afterwards. The results suggest that Earth would have experienced up to 700 days of darkness, which could have been a huge influence on the extinctions that resulted from the impact.
