JAKARTA – New study reveals, when asteroid the dinosaur exterminator collided with Earth 66 million years ago, a large amount of sulfur in which the volume was greater than previously thought, flew high into the stratosphere.
Reporting from Live Science, Wednesday (23/3/2022), after airborne, this large cloud of sulfur-containing gas blocked the Sun, and froze the Earth for decades to centuries.
Then, it falls as deadly acid rain on Earth, turning the oceans into a sea of chemistry for tens of thousands of years, which is longer than previously thought.
“We have underestimated the amount of sulfur created by this asteroid impact,” said study researcher and a lecturer in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol in England, James Witts.
As a result, climate change associated with it may be far more para than previously anticipated.
The fact that sulfur continues to flow onto the Earth’s surface may help explain why it took so long for life, especially marine life, to recover.
Because, a number of sulfur that fell to the mainland then drifted into the ocean. The researchers’ findings are called completely coincidental.
“It wasn’t something that was planned at all,” Witts said.
The research team originally planned to study the geochemistry of ancient shells near the Brazos River in Falls County, Texas. A unique place that was underwater during the late Cretaceous extinction, when non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out.
Its location, also not too far from the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, where a 10-kilometer wide asteroid hit the Earth’s surface.
