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The Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Plunged Earth Into Catastrophic Winter (bbc.com)
The asteroid impact roughly 66 million years ago that wiped out three-quarters of plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs, dropped temperatures globally below freezing for several years. The new assessment, reported in the journal Geographic Research Letters, gives scientists a much clearer picture of the climate catastrophe following the event. BCC reports: The UK geophysicist was the co-lead investigator on the 2016 project to drill into what remains of the impactor's crater under the Gulf of Mexico. She and colleagues spent several weeks retrieving the rock samples that would allow them to reconstruct precisely how the Earth reacted to being punched by a high-velocity space object. Their study suggests the asteroid approached the surface from the north-east, striking what was then a shallow sea at an oblique angle of 60 degrees. Roughly 12km wide and moving at about 18km/s, the stony impactor instantly excavated and vaporized thousands of billions of tonnes of rock. This material included a lot of sulphur-containing minerals such as gypsum and anhydrite, but also carbonates which yielded carbon dioxide. The team's calculations estimate the quantities ejected upwards at high speed into the upper atmosphere included 325 gigatones of sulphur (give or take 130Gt) and perhaps 425Gt of carbon dioxide (plus or minus 160Gt). The CO2 would eventually have a longer-term warming effect, but the release of so much sulphur, combined with soot and dust, would have had an immediate and very severe cooling effect.
Just pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract the warming of the carbon dioxide!
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!
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Problem Solved. Where do I collect my consultant fee?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How do we know it wasn't a weaponized asteroid intended to clearing and terraforming this planet for the new human species to evolve and be monitored?
Or roughly 50 billion octaves.
At the bottom of the
. . . could have told you that. Heck. the K/T Event has a distinct signature in any rock column, and its' characterization. . . in the 1980s. . . led to the TTAPS paper, better known as the "Nuclear Winter" paper. This is 35+ year-old "news". . .
As TFS says, "The new assessment gives scientists a much clearer picture of the climate catastrophe following the event."
I'm not sure what your point is? Everyone knows what happened. This is a piece of scientific research. It deepens our understanding of the event a little, adds more data-points, tightens some variables, gets corroborating evidence from a different (more direct) technique.