Paul Wilson

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it Was the asteroid or colossal volcanic activity has triggered the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago?

This was a bit of a "back and forth" argument of late, but now a group of scientists has weighed with what they claim is the final answer.

"the asteroid "wot dun it'!" Prof Paul Wilson told the BBC.

His team is not shown in the analysis of marine sediments, that the huge volcanoes that erupted in India change to to the climate enough that are threatened with extinction.

volcanoes spew huge amounts of gases in the atmosphere can cool and warm The Planet .

And the Deccan Traps, the volcanic terrain is known in India, has certainly had a massive - hundreds of thousands of cubic km of molten rock have been erupted on the surface of the earth over thousands of years.

But the new research from the University of Southampton is Prof Wilson and colleagues from Europe and the United States, there is an imbalance in the both the effect and the timing of the volcanism of influence.

The Group drilled in the North Atlantic sea floor to retrieve his old muds.

"The Deep -sea sediments are full of marine organisms, called foraminifera Packed with this microscope," Prof Wilson said.

"you get about a thousand of them in a teaspoon of sediment. And we can use their shells to find out the chemistry of The Ocean and its temperature, so we can study in detail the ecological changes in the run-up to the extinction event

"And what we have discovered is that the only way in which we conform to our (climate) model simulations, the observed temperature changes, and volcanic emissions of harmful gases, over and done with a few hundred thousand years before the impact event.

"We find the impact of time-to-event is exactly the same with extinction. "

investigations of a 200 km wide crater under The Gulf of Mexico, it is The Scar left by the perpetrator of the asteroid.

If it hit the earth, the city-size object would immediately have generated tsunami, and wide-Scale fire - in addition to hurl billions of tons of debris in All Directions .

But what the scientists have also recently noted that the asteroid struck the rock, which is rich in sulfur. If this material was vaporized and ejected into The High atmosphere, which would have led to a rapid and deep cooling of the climate (albeit over a relatively short period of time), make life a struggle for all kinds of plant and animal life.

shows How the fossil record, the dinosaurs, aside from birds, could not on the stressful changes in the environment. In contrast, The Mammals could, and rose to the prominence they enjoy Today .

published in the journal Science. Its leading author, Dr. Pincelli Hull, Yale University .

The impact that changed life on earth

Today , the asteroid-crater buried is formed under The Gulf of Mexico, Mexico's famous sinkholes (cenotes), the weakened limestone above The Crater

geology, asteroids, earth science, fossils, palaeontology, extinction, dinosaurs

Source of news: bbc.com