
Geologists Find Clues In Crater Left By Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid - hoffmannesque
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/06/476871766/geologists-find-clues-in-crater-left-by-dinosaur-killing-asteroid
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lisper
> "I think it was a bad few months, really," Morgan says.

Actually, there's quite a bit of evidence that the dinos were wiped out in a
matter of days, if not hours. The ejecta from the impact was launched out into
space on sub-orbital trajectories. When it fell back, it heated the atmosphere
and turned the whole planet into a giant convection oven.

[http://www3.nd.edu/~cneal/CRN_Papers/Schulte10_Sci_Chicxulub...](http://www3.nd.edu/~cneal/CRN_Papers/Schulte10_Sci_Chicxulub.pdf)

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mrfusion
How did birds and mammals survive?

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elcct
Birds are dinosaurs

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tamana
Non-extinct.

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akkartik
This animation shows the land basically behaving like a liquid in response to
the impact: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub-
animation....](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub-
animation.gif)

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Aelinsaar
The scale of this event really does boggle the mind.

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pdwetz
The novel Seveneves brings a similar (actually, far worse) event in a modern
environment. Both a fun and nightmarish thought exercise.

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intrasight
I immediately thought of Seveneves as well. You know some time thousands of
years in the future, the Earth's humaniods are going to ask how their
ancestors survived the asteroid in our future.

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oliv__
Pardon my ignorance but I don't exactly get how dinosaurs were wiped out of
the earth by _one_ asteroid.

Were all the dinosaurs located in the same small area? Or did the remaining
dinos die from the subsequent winter?

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tommoor
Very simple and quick explanation as far as I remember it - the large
dinosaurs that survived the initial impact were wiped out by the ensuing
'winter' and lack of food (they needed a lot to sustain themselves). Plenty of
smaller creatures survived including types of dinosaurs that evolved into
birds.

Happy to be corrected :)

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colin_fraizer
Is it possible that it wasn't an asteroid at all, but just a Tesla Model S?

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sandworm101
Title error because of old science. The asteroid killed off lots of things,
but dinos were already on the way out. Maybe next year things will swing back,
but atm the rock wasn't to blame.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/18/dinosaurs-
in...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/18/dinosaurs-in-decline-
long-before-asteroid-catastrophe-study-reveals)

"...a huge tsunami that was triggered when the asteroid struck."

I think we need a different word for that scale of wave.

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laumars
"a new study suggests" != "new science"

As good as it is to have new papers on the topic, let's not fall into the pop-
science trap of thinking every new research will "cure cancer", "change our
entire understanding of physics" and all the other premature comments that
people make.

