Almost thirty years ago, the discovery of anomalously high abundance of iridium and other platinum group elements in the Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary led to the hypothesis that an asteroid collided with the Earth and caused one of the most devastating events in the history of life. The impact created the 180-kilometre wide Chicxulub crater causing widespread tsunamis along the coastal zones of the surrounding oceans and released an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT and produced high concentrations of dust, soot, and sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere.

Three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth disappeared, including non-avian dinosaurs, other vertebrates, marine reptiles and invertebrates, planktonic foraminifera and ammonites. Marine ecosystems lost about half of their species while freshwater environments shows low extinction rates, about 10% to 22% of genera.

The decrease of sunlight caused a drastic short-term global reduction in temperature (15 °C on a global average, 11 °C over the ocean, and 28 °C over land). While the surface and lower atmosphere cooled, the tropopause became much warmer, eliminate the tropical cold trap and allow water vapor mixing ratios to increase to well over 1,000 ppmv in the stratosphere. Those events accelerated the destruction of the ozone layer. During this period, UV light was able to reach the surface at highly elevated and harmful levels. This phenomenon is called “impact winter”.

Recent drilling of the peak ring of the Chicxulub impact crater has been used to create 3-D numerical simulations of the crater formation. It was estimate that the angle of impact at Chicxulub was ~60° with a downrange direction to the southwest. The new study indicates that the impact may have released around three times as much sulfur and much less carbon dioxide compared with previous calculations, suggesting that surface temperatures were likely to have been signiﬁcantly reduced for several years and ocean temperatures affected for hundreds of years after the Chicxulub impact.

References:

Artemieva, N., Morgan, J., & Expedition 364 Science Party (2017). Quantifying the rel ease of climate-active gase s by large meteor ite impact s with a case study of Chicxu lub. G eophysical Research DOI: 10.1002/2017GL07487 9 DOI:

Charles G. Bardeen, Rolando R. Garcia, Owen B. Toon, and Andrew J. Conley, On transient climate change at the Cretaceous−Paleogene boundary due to atmospheric soot injections, PNAS 2017 ; published ahead of print August 21, 2017 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1708980114

Brugger J., G. Feulner, and S. Petri (2016), Baby, it’s cold outside: Climate model simulations of the effects of the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, doi:10.1002/2016GL072241.