Monday 21 August 2017

The long night: Dinosaur-destroying asteroid darkened Earth for 18 months

According to new simulations, the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs plunged the Earth into ...

If you were lucky enough to be in the solar eclipse's path of totality this week, you might have seen a few minutes of darkness in the middle of the day. But that's nothing compared to 65 million years ago, when the sun may have disappeared for a year and a half. The huge asteroid that crashed into Earth back then may have wiped out the dinosaurs, but the force of the impact alone wasn't the problem. New simulations show that particles thrown into the atmosphere would have blocked sunlight for up to 18 months, disrupting the photosynthesis of plants and cascading into one of the worst mass extinction events the world has ever seen.

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