The fall to Earth of a meteorite 65 million years ago, which caused the death of dinosaurs, is nothing more than an accident, the probability of which was extremely small. After all, if the place of the fall was any other, the mass extinction of living beings would not have occurred. This is the conclusion reached by Japanese scientists from Tohoku University.
The research results are published in Scientific Reports. To date, almost no one disputes the role of the meteorite in the extinction of huge lizards. However, its role in the extinction of dinosaurs and marine reptiles is still a matter of controversy: if the asteroid and the ice age caused by it killed the ancient reptiles, why did not crocodiles, turtles and birds disappear with them?
About a year ago, scientists Kunio Kaiho and Naga Oshima began to work out another theory: it is possible that the asteroid fell on a huge layer of sedimentary rocks that contained huge reserves of oil. The fall of the celestial body released this oil and set it on fire, as a result of which a huge amount of soot and ash entered the atmosphere, causing an "asteroid winter" and killing all animals with a "fast" metabolism, which required a lot of food and heat to survive. Other representatives of the fauna survived. It was possible to find out that only 10% of the corners of the Earth contain sufficient reserves of oil to generate about 250-500 million tons of ash and ash needed to start a long-term "nuclear winter" and start a mass extinction.
“Dinosaurs were just out of luck. If the asteroid had fallen to almost any other point on the planet, then there would have been no large or even small cooling of the climate. In fact, we can say that the fate of the dinosaurs was decided not by the fall of the asteroid, but by the place where this cataclysm occurred."
Based on materials from RIA Novosti
Vladimir Kuznetsov