It’s believed that an asteroid about 5.6 miles (9 km) wide slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago, wiping out 75 percent of the species on Earth. The deadly rock struck with the force of 10 billion nuclear bombs, experts say, and sent so much soot and sulfate particles into the atmosphere that it blocked out the Sun, chilling the planet and setting off an ecosystem collapse that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. But according to a new study, had it hit nearly anywhere else, the damage would not have been so catastrophic, and the dinosaurs might have survived.
It all started with a bang:
- In a November 2017 paper published in Scientific Reports, Japanese scientists claim that only 13 percent of the Earth's surface had the right composition to instigate such a mass extinction.
- Dinosaurs might still be roaming the Earth, they say, if the celestial object had hit almost anywhere else on the planet.
- The impact zone was rich in hydrocarbon and sulfate, the scientists wrote, and the impact produced a deadly stew of “stratospheric soot and sulfate aerosols,” triggering extreme global cooling and drought.