At the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, the impact of a gigantic asteroid in Chicxulub, on the coast of Mexico, darkened the skies and cooled the planet, killing all the dinosaurs except the birds or so it was believed until recently. An international team of researchers has carried out various analyses that show that these prehistoric beings already had their time numbered, even without the impact of the famous Chicxulub asteroid.
The Dinosaurs Would See Their End, Even Without an Asteroid
According to an article in Science Advances, the world before the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs was anything but paradise. In fact, according to the findings reported in the aforementioned study, the conditions on Earth were quite hostile to life. The volcanic activity even led to several alterations that, sooner or later, would end up depleting the populations of the different species of dinosaurs, so the asteroid only advanced the events.
The new research provides evidence that the volcanic activity of that distant time was so significant as to cause strong climatic alterations. For this, they analyzed the levels of mercury, the new research provides evidence that the volcanic activity of that distant time was so significant as to cause strong climatic alterations.
Analysis of the End of the Dinosaurs
The team examined rocks from the Deccan Traps, a large igneous province located in west-central India. In this way, they discovered that that volcanic region alone released an astonishing amount of one million cubic kilometers of molten rock. That, in turn, highlights that climatic conditions were almost certainly unstable, producing repeated volcanic winters that could have lasted decades, shortly before the great extinction, even before the asteroid arrived.
This story was written in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera
