The end of the dinosaurs. Artist's impression Digital:This article is taken from the magazine Sciences et Avenir N°825, dedicated to black holes. You will find a link to get it at the bottom of this article.
EVOLUTION. By striking Earth in Mexico 66.043 million years ago, an asteroid caused an acceleration of volcanism in India during the fifty thousand years following the impact. "It's the combination of the two phenomena "which sounded the death knell for the dinosaurs, concludes an American-Indian study - and not one or the other. Confirmation of a scenario developed in 1995 by the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico (United States (Read Sciences et Avenir n° 577, March 1995.) "Our dating by the new argon-argon method has made it possible to clarify the sequence of events with a precision more than 20 times greater than what was possible 5 years ago ", underlines the geophysicist Loÿc Vanderkluysen, of Drexel University (Philadelphia, United States). The collision would have thrown an obscuring cloud and caused a phenomenal seismic wave. "The equivalent of an earthquake of magnitude 11 ", assures geologist Paul Renne, of the University of California at Berkeley (United States), "which would have disturbed the feeding chamber of volcanoes ". The lava flows, which had started slowly 400,000 years before the impact, more than doubled afterwards. And the volcanoes belched sulfur aerosols, plunging the Earth into a long murderous winter.