The Earth seems to be covered in endless night with the death of many plants and animals after the giant asteroid hit.
US scientists concluded that the Earth was in darkness for two years after being hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago, Phys.org reported yesterday. This is also the asteroid that made the dinosaurs extinct after 165 million years of dominating the Earth.
More than three-quarters of all species on Earth became extinct after the asteroid hit the planet 65 million years ago. (Photo: iStock).
With support from NASA and the University of Colorado Boulder, a team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) used computers to model the landscape on Earth. Land in the late Cretaceous from when the large asteroid struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico, causing earthquakes, tsunamis, and widespread volcanic eruptions.
Computer models helped the team understand why more than three-quarters of the species on the planet perished at that time, while a few others survived.
“The extinction of many large land animals may have been the direct effect of the impact, but those that lived in the oceans or burrowed underground temporarily survived. We wanted to look at these systems. the long-term effects of the enormous amount of soot produced by the impact on the surviving animals,” said Charles Bardeen, a scientist at NCAR.
According to simulation results, 15,000 million tons of soot spewed into the atmosphere when the asteroid hit, forming a barrier between Earth and sunlight . “At first, the sky will be as dark as on a moonlit night,” said study co-author Owen Toon at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Simulate dinosaur doom day. (Video: BBC).
Gradually, the soot layer dissipated and the sky became bright again, but photosynthesis could not take place for more than 18 months because the asteroid destroyed most of the Earth’s trees and the phytoplankton was severely impacted. due to lack of sunlight.
Even if the assumptions are wrong and only one-third of the amount of nitrogen released into the atmosphere is estimated, photosynthesis cannot take place within a year. The lack of sunlight causes the Earth’s temperature to drop to 28 degrees Celsius on land and 11 degrees Celsius in the ocean. In the upper layers of the atmosphere, soot warms the atmosphere, and water vapor reacts with the stratosphere, producing hydrogen that destroys the ozone layer.