Independent Learning Log
Date: 17th June 2016
Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/what-happened-day-dinosaurs-died-chicxulub-drilling-asteroid-science/
What I did:
Wanted to know more about what had happened when dinosaurs became extinct. Apart knowing that it was a meteorite that killed them.
Summary:
It turns out that it was not a meteorite. Instead, it was an asteroid that hit the Earth that had an explosive yield estimated at over one hundred trillion tonnes of TNT. This created an impact that penetrated the Earth's crust and vaporised thousands of cubic miles of rock. This wiped out eight percent of life on Earth. A team of British scientists had recently obtained the first-ever core samples from the "peak ring" of the Chicxulub Crater. Researchers hope that this could help them gain a better understanding the phenomenal forces unleashed that day.
The researchers would describe what would happen if we were still there that day when it happened. I found out that we most likely would all have died as natural disasters such as tsunamis would start to happen, and the trees would get set on fire. And the carbon footprint left behind is massive. Lots of carbon dioxide and monoxide, along with other deadly gases, would linger in the atmosphere. This would make it hard for plants to photosynthesize, the air would be unhealthy and the rain would be acidic. These conditions would make living on Earth impossible. But this is only a part of what would happen.
These first-ever core samples are what researchers hope that will fill in the gaps of this theory.
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