66 million years ago an event changed the course of the Earth as it was known, because what seemed to be a normal day ended in the mass extinction of 75% of the species of flora and fauna that inhabited then, among the animals were the mighty dinosaurs.
The Chicxulub asteroid (devil’s tail) collided with Earth, impacting the Yucatan peninsula, south of Mexico; forming a diameter of 14 kilometers (km) that was destroying everything in its path, a fact that completely changed the conditions of the planet.
According to the NASA this asteroid left a crater 180 km wide and 900 meters deep.
The impact of the asteroid reached such consequences that, for a year after having touched the Earth, a greenhouse effect was generated by the dense cloud of ash that remained surrounding the planet, preventing sunlight from penetrating, so the temperature dropped drastically. , causing a glaciation; and the plant species could not carry out the process of photosynthesis, dying and leaving the Chicxulub survivors without food.
These extreme conditions were the ones that led thousands of species to extinction, despite this, this event was crucial in the history of the blue planet, since it gave way to the evolution of species, propitiating our own existence, since many animals no longer they had their predators, the dinosaurs; which favored that now they were the ones that predominated.
This is when history as we know it takes a turn; Well, studies reveal that this asteroid could not be the only one responsible for such a catastrophic event. Professor Uisdean Nicholson, an assistant at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, mistakenly discovered, while reviewing seismic studies for tectonic cleavage, the existence of a buried crater 400 meters off the coast of West Africa, which could also place it as responsible for one of the largest mass extinctions.
The crater that was baptized with the name of the seamount, Nadir, is almost the same age as the one responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The work was published in the magazine Science Advancesmentioning that the crater is 8 km wide, which led to the hypothesis that the pair of asteroids (Chicxulub, Nadir) could be part of a mother body that suffered a fracture before colliding with our planet.
Scientists suggest drilling the crater to see the composition of the minerals in the soil and to be completely sure that it is a fragment of the Chicxulub asteroid.
Veronica Bray, A planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, mentions “Many people have wondered: How could the Chicxulub impact (albeit huge) be so globally destructive? it could be that he had help.”
Undoubtedly, the finding of Nadir changes and expands the panorama of what could have happened 66 million years ago, as well as justifying the dimension of the damage caused to the Earth.
All details at: Science Advances.
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