The fall to Earth of a meteorite 65 million years ago that caused the death of the dinosaurs, is nothing short of an accident, the probability of which was extremely small. After all, if the place of falling was any other, mass extinction of living beings would not have happened. To such conclusion the Japanese scientists from Tohoku University.
The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports. To date, the role of meteorite in the extinction of the great lizards, almost no one disputes. However, its role in the extinction of dinosaurs and marine reptiles is still a matter of dispute: if the asteroid and the resulting ice age destroyed the ancient reptiles, then why with them have not disappeared crocodiles, turtles and birds?
About a year ago, scientists Kunio Kaiho and Naga Oshima began to work out a different theory: perhaps an asteroid fell on the huge reservoir of sedimentary rocks, which contained huge reserves of oil. The fall of a celestial body released this oil and lit it on fire, causing the atmosphere got a huge amount of soot and ash that caused “asteroid winter” and killed all the animals with fast metabolism for survival which had a lot of food and heat. Other fauna survived. Found out that only 10% of the parts of the Earth contain enough oil reserves to produce approximately 250 to 500 million tons of ash and ash needed to run long-term “nuclear winter” and the beginning of a mass extinction.
“The dinosaurs were just unlucky. If an asteroid fell on almost any other point on the planet, then there would be no large or even a small cooling of climate. In fact, we can say that the fate of the dinosaurs decided the fall of the asteroid, and the place of this disaster.”
Based on materials of RIA “news”
The extinction of the dinosaurs is only a coincidence
Vladimir Kuznetsov