Here's What Really Happened After The Asteroid Struck Earth

Scientists used an impact calculator to recreate what immediately happened when the deadly asteroid struck and killed the dinosaurs.

The asteroid impact theory has been told countless of times since it first came out in 1980 said that a fireball struck Earth with an estimated explosive yield of more than 100 trillion tons of TNT. The impact was described to have penetrated the planet's crust for a couple of miles deep resulting to the formation of a crater more than 115 miles across and vaporizing rocks by thousands of cubic miles, Tech Times reported.

The identification of Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1990s then made it possible for scientists to have an accurate idea of when and where the asteroid exactly struck. However, exactly how the fallout killed off so much life on Earth has remained a tantalizing mystery.

Last month, British researchers involved on a Gulf of Mexico offshore drilling platform were able to acquire the first core samples from the Chicxulub Crater's so-called "peak ring." The ring is believed to be the location where the Earth rebounded a few moments after the asteroid strike. It is said that the ring's geology will help scientists better understand what really happened.

A team of geophysicists from Purdue University and Imperial College London created an "impact calculator" where users can key in details such as asteroid's size and speed, in order recreate the events that transpired.

"You can plug in different distances from the point of impact to see how the effects change over distance," says Joanna Morgan, one of the lead scientists on the Chicxulub drilling project. "If you were close by, say within 1,000 kilometers [625 miles], you would be instantaneously, or within a few seconds, killed by the fireball."

According to National Geographic, scientists in the project also witnessed that after the fire was the flood, where the asteroid strike was believed to have created a tsunami that would've been thousands of feet high. The consecutive earthquakes would also probably be more powerful than anything humans can ever imagine. Seismology expert Rick Aster of the Colorado State University and former president of the Seismological Society of America described the quake to be "a seismic event akin to all the world's quakes for the last 160 years simultaneously going off."

Over eight minutes after the impact, ejecta would start to spill down, covering the burning landscapes under a blanket of hot grit and ask. Land close to the impact zone would be under hundreds and thousands of feet of rubble.

Gareth Collins, an ICL lecturer who helped develop the program, pointed out what would be near "total darkness" in the first few hours. In the following weeks to months - even years - there would be something between twilight and super cloudy days.

However, it is believed that the lasting environmental effects were the major reasons why dinosaurs went extinct in the long run. The darkness, for instance, drastically decreased photosynthesis, with ash and soot washing out of the atmosphere resulting in rain falling as acidic mud.

Fires that spread wide areas would have also resulted to overwhelming amounts of toxic chemicals in the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer.

The impact's carbon footprint itself is believed to have released about 10,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide, as well as 100 billion tons of carbon monoxide and 100 billion tons of methane in an instant. From nuclear winter to extreme warming, most life forms suffered to the point of extinction.

The drilling project is hoped to better fill the gaps in this theory and help scientists better understand post-impact climate.