Deadly Steam – Details of a New Dinosaur Extinction Scenario

A new study by planetary scientists from Purdue University proposes a dinosaur extinction scenario: not from starvation, but from thermal radiation trapped by a dust cloud after the asteroid impact. The heat was 17 times the lethal dose for humans, causing fires and animal deaths within hours.

A new study by planetary scientists from Purdue University, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, proposes a radically different scenario for the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. According to the work, the cause of the mass extinction was not years of starvation due to a dust veil, but thermal radiation trapped by a cloud of fine dust that acted like a 'lid on a pot.' The Chicxulub asteroid, the size of Everest, lifted hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of rock, part of which condensed into spherical particles. These particles prevented the heat from the explosion from escaping into space, creating a dose of thermal radiation 17 times the lethal dose for humans. This was enough to ignite vegetation and cause massive forest fires. Dr. Alexandria Johnson and Professor Brandon Johnson explain that the catastrophe occurred within hours, not years. Only burrowing animals and aquatic inhabitants could survive. The scientists reached their conclusions by analyzing spherical particles the size of half a sugar grain found in the gills of dead paddlefish. Dust settling could have lasted for years, and microparticles continued to harm surviving species.