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66 million years ago, an asteroid collision almost ended all life on Earth when it slammed into the Mexican coast. While many of the ancient beasts within the general vicinity of the impact zone from the eight-mile-wide asteroid were instantly vaporized, things only got worse for every other species on the planet, according to science.
Scientists researching the Chicxulub impact crater (via CNET) under the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico have used a supercomputer to crunch new extinction numbers and create computer simulations to discover what happened after the initial asteroid impact. If a cosmic crash landing that had around 10 billion atomic bombs worth of power, deadly debris falling back to the planet, and acidic oceans weren’t bad enough, surviving dinosaurs also had to brace for a series of tsunamis that traveled across the globe.
Combined with data gathered from deep ocean cores that provide a historical layered record of Earth’s geologic history, scientists discovered that the tsunami waves created by the asteroid impact were biblical in scale. “Any historically documented tsunamis pale in comparison with such global impact,” researchers said in a statement. A three-mile high wave was formed two minutes after impact, and while it did shrink down to around one-third of its size after three minutes, it still left devastation in its path for around 140 miles in all directions.
Lingering effects touched all corners of the globe, and scientists discovered that just about all of ancient Earth’s coasts had been slammed by these humongous waves. While research into the extinction event continues, our species is working on ways to ensure that we don’t have to live through a real-life Deep Impact scenario. NASA scientists recently began a new project called DART–Double Asteroid Redirection Test-which diverts the course of asteroids by slamming a rocket into them, and are busy crunching the numbers to see if the experiment was successful.
