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Scientists discover more evidence that dinosaurs were killed by a gigantic asteroid

Researchers help confirm what has always been hypothesized by examining an impact crater off the Gulf of Mexico.

Corinne Reichert Senior Editor
Corinne Reichert (she/her) grew up in Sydney, Australia and moved to California in 2019. She holds degrees in law and communications, and currently writes news, analysis and features for CNET across the topics of electric vehicles, broadband networks, mobile devices, big tech, artificial intelligence, home technology and entertainment. In her spare time, she watches soccer games and F1 races, and goes to Disneyland as often as possible.
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Corinne Reichert
Asteroid dinosaurs

Scientists work in the Gulf of Mexico to find evidence of a mega asteroid that caused wildfires, tsunamis and global cooling.

RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have found "hard evidence" of the asteroid that killed off dinosaurs. The research, published Monday and reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, shows the asteroid caused wildfires and tsunamis after hitting with the impact of 10 billion WWII-era atomic bombs.

Inside an impact crater off the Gulf of Mexico scientists discovered charcoal and soil, swept inside by the backflow of a tsunami within the first 24 hours of the asteroid impact, research said. This showed how the blast ignited trees and plants thousands of miles away from the impact zone, and triggered a far-reaching inland tsunami across the Americas.

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But no sulfur was found in the core of the impact crater -- meaning around 325 billion metric tons of sulfur was released into the atmosphere that day. This destroyed Earth's existing climate, blocking out the sun and causing a global cooling period that caused the "mass extinction" of the dinosaurs.

So the dinosaurs were first fried and then frozen, said Sean Gulick, a University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) research professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences.

"The real killer has got to be atmospheric," Gulick said. "The only way you get a global mass extinction like this is an atmospheric effect."

This is what would happen if we still had dinosaurs

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