Asteroid Impact Didn't Cause a Global Firestorm that Wiped Out the Dinosaurs

What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? Scientists have long thought that an asteroid might have helped but now, new research has debunked the theory that a massive impact also caused vast global firestorms that led to a global mass extinction.

In order to better understand what would happen to our planet once a massive asteroid struck Earth, the scientists recreated the immense energy released from an extraterrestrial collision. They found that the intense but short-lived heat near the impact site couldn't have ignited live plants, which challenges the idea that the impact led to global firestorms.

In fact, the researchers found that the heat pulse close to the impact site in Mexico would have lasted for less than a minute. This pulse would have been too short to ignite live plant material. That said, the effects of the impact would have still been felt as far away as New Zealand where the heat would have been less intense but longer lasting-heating the ground for about seven minutes, which is long enough to ignite plant matter.

"By combining computer simulations of the impact with methods from engineering we have been able to recreate the enormous heat of the impact in the laboratory," said Clair Belcher, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This has shown us that the heat was more likely to severely affect ecosystems a long distance away, such that forests in New Zealand would have had more chance of suffering major wildfires than forests in North America that were close to the impact. This flips our understanding of the effects of the impact on its head and means that paleontologists may need to look for new clues from fossils found a long way from the impact to better understand the mass extinction event."

The findings reveal that "firestorms" probably weren't global. Fires that didn't occur, in fact, probably occurred far away from the initial impact site. This, in turn, reveals a bit more about the Cretaceous impact, which may help researchers evaluate future impacts.

The findings are published in the Journal of the Geological Society.

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