The space rock responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs was so powerful that it set fire to forests more than 1,500 miles away, new research shows.
Around 66 million years ago, a mass extinction event occurred that wiped out around three-quarters of all living species on the planet.
The consensus is that this event was caused by the Chicxulub impact—an asteroid strike that left behind a 124-mile-wide mark on Earth.
The power the impact generated was colossal. Immediately, the blast would have generated a core of superheated plasma and a shockwave that radiated across seas and deep into the continental interior, causing damage across a radius of 932 miles, according to initial estimates cited by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI).
Nearer to the impact site, wind speeds in excess of 621 miles per hour would have been possible, and farther away, debris would have rained down. Tsunamis, possibly between 328 and 984 feet high, would have engulfed coastlines.
The impact is also thought to have sparked widespread wildfires, but when and how these wildfires started has been a matter of debate.
Professor Ben Kneller, a geoscientist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland who co-authored the study, said in a press release: “Until now it has not been clear whether the fires were caused as a direct result of the impact or subsequently, as vegetation killed by the post-impact darkness caused by the debris thrown up into the atmosphere was set ablaze by things such as lightning strikes.”
By analyzing rocks dating to the time of the strike, geoscientists from the United Kingdom think they have found new evidence that wildfires started within just minutes of the asteroid impact, spanning up to 1,500 miles from the impact crater.
Coastal fires may not have lasted long before they were washed away by the aforementioned tsunami. Looking at the fossilized remains of these trees, the U.K. researchers found that the trees were already burning by the time the tsunamis hit.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports in July, says that trees would have been burning at temperatures up to around 1,000 degrees Celsius in the time between the asteroid impact and the tsunami, which would have been “only tens of minutes at most.”
As for what sparked the fires in the first place, the geoscientists concluded that either a gigantic fireball caused by the impact or showers of molten rock falling back through the atmosphere would have been responsible.
Kneller said the team’s research “paints a vivid and quite terrifying picture of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the meteorite strike.”
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