HONG KONG: New findings suggest that a prehistoric asteroid collision is not responsible for wiping out the dinosaur population in northeast Asia 65 million years ago. A new research is challenging the widely accepted hypothesis that a large ASTEROID killed all the dinosaurs on this planet, the event that changed the food chain and life on Earth forever.
A team of experts in London published a new research that will try to debunk the popular ASTEROID IMPACT HYPOTHESIS that wiped out all the dinosaurs on Earth. Scientists at the University of Exeter, University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London have joined forces to recreate and simulate the asteroid impact collision and see if the energy produced is capable to initiate a massive extinction.
The research is entitled “An experimental assessment of the ignition of forest fuels by the thermal pulse generated by the Cretaceous–Palaeogene impact at Chicxulub.” In case you’re wondering, Chicxulub is the name of the crater believed to be the focal site of the large asteroid impact in Mexico.
Tests made claim that near the impact site around the 200 kilometer-wide crater, the intense heat of the collision is powerful enough to burn all plants including live green plants but too short to affect bigger areas — but surprisingly in other regions, or like New Zealand as noted by the report, the impact may not be powerful enough but longer lasting, and long enough to ignite live plants including the green fresh ones.
For several years now, textbooks and documentaries on television show the great asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs after massive firestorms covered almost all areas of the Earth. The said event destroyed food source, killed plants and animals species and destroying the once-stable food-chain.
According to Dr Claire Belcher from the Earth System Science group in Geography at the University of Exeter said, they’ve simulated the enormous heat produced by the impact inside the laboratory. The energy produced was powerful enough to affect ecosystems but more severely on ecosystems far from the impact like New Zealand because the heat was longer lasting than in North America which is closer to the asteroid impact, because fires lasted shorter.
