The story of a day when the dinosaurs are gone

Geologists keep evidence documenting Earth's worst day, of course, 66 million years ago.

The log is a fragment of rock from a crater buried in the Gulf of Mexico, sediments formed after the fall of a massive asteroid in the Earth.

This highlights an event that, according to the researchers, is now responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs and the dominance of mammals.

A joint US-UK team was able to tell the disaster with great precision after spending several weeks in 2016 exploring the remains of a crater formed by the collision.

The crater, 200 km wide, is located under the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. The best preserved central parts are located off Chichulup Harbor.

The team was able to extract a large mass of rock containing a particular part that essentially documents the first day of the event, which geologists call the beginning of "the era of modern life", or that others prefer to call "The age of mammals".

This part is a mixture of broken material. Scientists say that by organizing the content, they can create a clear narrative of what has happened.

The glass debris covers the bottom of the crater, a rock melted by the heat and pressure that came to the bottom during the seconds and minutes that followed the event.

This led to the formation of many melted and fragmented rocks as a result of explosions accompanied by a burst of water on the hot material.

The flow of water from a shallow sea that covered the area at the time, led to a path temporarily deflected by the event. However, when the water was withdrawn inside and came into contact with the boiling rock, there were violent reactions, similar to those of volcanoes, when the molten lava interacted with sea water.

This phase includes the period from the first minutes to 60 minutes, while the water continued to flow and filled the hole. The upper main part is 80 to 90 meters long from all the debris that was in this water.

The main upper portion of the 130-meter length also indicates the presence of a tsunami, noting that all sediments flow in one direction, indicating that they were deposited by a high-energy activity.

Scientists say the impact led to the creation of a vibratory wave generated by a giant wave, which collided with the coastline extending for hundreds of kilometers from the crater, and this vibration of external propulsion oscillation, and covered the debris washed away by the tsunami rock summit sequence.

"All of this is still the first day," said Sean Gulick of the University of Texas at Austin.

"The tsunami is moving fast with a jet, and twenty-four hours is a big time for the waves to scramble and roll back," he told the BBC.

Gulick's team is confident in the explanations provided by the tsunami because the difference in sediment is a marker in the soil and in the coal – evidence of the large fires that occurred near the landmasses because of the impact heat, all returned to the pit by the oscillation of the back wave.

Scientists have drawn attention to the presence of sulfur, which the team sees nowhere else in the center of the hole. This is surprising because the asteroid has hit the bottom of the sea of ​​which one-third to one-half contains minerals containing sulfur, such as gypsum.

For whatever reason, the sulfur must have been specifically ejected or evaporated, but that only reinforces the common theory of dinosaur disappearance.

Evaporation of a large amount of sulfur mixed with water will greatly cool the climate, making life extremely difficult for all kinds of plants and animals.

"A global climate model dominated by only 100 gigatonnes of sulfur has evaporated into the atmosphere and cooled the climate by 25 degrees Celsius for at least 15 years, freezing most of the planet." "said Gulick.

"The moderate estimate of the amount of sulfur emitted is 325 gigatonnes, which is much larger than any volcano like Krakatau, which can also cool the climate for a short time."

Mammals have managed to overcome this disaster and the dinosaurs have not been able to disappear.