Scientists believe that they have finally managed to find out the cause of the death of dinosaurs on Earth about 66 million years ago. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Slashdot.
According to an international team of scientists, the culprit is fine silicate dust formed from crushed rock after an asteroid hit millions of years ago.
Scientists suggest that this dust remained in the planet’s atmosphere for 15 years and caused a 15°C drop in global temperature. The researchers found that the size of the dust particles ranged from 0.8 to 8.0 micrometers.
According to experts, it was the dust that “stopped” plant photosynthesis for a while and provoked a “catastrophic collapse” that wiped out three-quarters of life on the planet, including dinosaurs.
By the way, last year the American Geophysical Union created a new global model of the impact tsunami provoked by the asteroid crash in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago. It was assumed that the destructive wave was observed in all corners of the Earth and at the beginning had a height of almost 2 km.
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