Life returned ‘surprisingly quickly’ after dinosaur-killing asteroid strike

dinosaur

Life came back surprisingly quickly to the site of the impact that killed the dinosaurs, new research found.

When a 6-mile (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, causing the demise of the dinosaurs as part of the largest mass extinction event in the last 100 million years, it took life on the planet at least 30,000 years to bounce back. The space rock also melted the crust and mantle at the point of impact, making modern scientists suspect that life would have had a particularly challenging time recovering at that location.

“Life returned to the crater very quickly,” Christopher Lowery, a researcher at the University of Texas-Austin, said during a news conference at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference …  [on] March 21.

But when the asteroid slammed into the Earth, it almost immediately created a 150-km-wide (90 miles) sterile region where no life could survive.

“There’s life on the seafloor within 30,000 years of the impact,” Lowery said…

Where that life came from is still unknown, however, he said. It could have crawled back from the newly formed hydrothermal vents created by the impact, or it could have washed in from another part of the ocean, Lowery said.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Life Bounced Back Fast after Dino-Killing Impact

For more background on the Genetic Literacy Project, read GLP on Wikipedia.

 

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