New research contradicts popular theory that a nuclear winter wiped out the dinosaurs

Scientists have long speculated that the demise of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago was due to starvation triggered by a nuclear winter that followed a major asteroid impact.However, disturbing new research suggests the prehistoric megadeath may have come quicker and burned hotter.

A recent study published in the journal JGR Biogeosciences proposes that extreme heat and rampant fires may have played a major role in eradicating/burning to death land-based life, including the dinosaurs.Scientists generally agree that when the six-mile-wide Chicxulub meteorite struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous Period, it vaporized huge quantities of rock that condensed into tiny droplets.These droplets, known as spherules, were cast around the planet before falling back through Earth’s atmosphere at several miles per second.When the spherules slowed in their free fall, their kinetic energy became heat, creating a worldwide surge of thermal radiation.

Previous research posits that this heat surge was powerful enough to kill thin-skinned animals but not intense enough to set vegetation ablaze and barbecue thick-skinned animals like the dinosaurs.However, in 2023, at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota, researchers identified a deposit layer above the spherules.

Researchers believe this fine dust cloud could have functioned as a kind of prehistoric insulating blanket, trapping thermal radiation on Earth’s surface and igniting worldwide wildfires. “With the dust cloud trapping thermal radiation, it was like the surface, and everything on it was being charbroiled – and that’s what killed the dinosaurs and all the other animals,” lead author Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, said in a statement.Johnson and his team estimate that this heat blanket could have made the heat surge 3.5 times more powerful than previous calculations estimated and intense enough to start spontaneous forest fires.“We’re in ...