The debates about how and why dinosaurs died are not going away. This discovery raises new questions about events on Earth just after the fall of the asteroid, from which humanity inherited the giant Chicxulub crater.

details of the study

For decades, scientists have predicted that the impact hurled so much dust and dirt into the atmosphere that it caused a type of nuclear winter, but in this case it’s more accurately called a shock winter.

Our study will reveal a drop in temperature over a period of 1000 years or more. But we found no evidence of a “nuclear winter”.
– says the article’s author, Lauren O’Connor of the University of Utrecht.

O’Connor and his team analyzed the bacteria fossilized in coal samples before, during, and after the impact. In response to changes in temperature, these bacteria thicken or thin their cell walls.

Instead of traces of cold found a warming trend of about 5,000 yearsstabilized relatively quickly. These warm years may have been caused by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by supervolcanoes during the millennium before the abrupt end of the Cretaceous period.

This does not mean that shock winter is completely ruled out. A blanket of dust hurled by an asteroid can only stay in the atmosphere for ten years or less. does not change global temperatures noticeably, but plunges the Earth into darkness, destroying vegetation. So the results suggest that the Earth may recover from climate change faster than previously thought, but recover without mass extinctions.