I have always felt that the Universe is ruled by a higher power.
When viewing the history of the Earth, perhaps God, viewing the dinosaurs in their many species spread across the changing continents, Gondwanaland, Pangea, et al, realized that this wasn't his final plan.
So God, in his infinite wisdom, tossed or nudged that asteroid out of its sun circling orbit and sent it on its long accelerating plunge into the ancient Yucatan, the worst place for such an Everest sized interloper to strike.
Why? Because the area surrounding the impact crater is full of sulfur-rich rocks. This, according to researchers, supports the theory that the asteroid impact vaporized the sulfur-bearing minerals present at the impact site, releasing the huge quantity of sulphur trioxide into the atmosphere, where it would have rapidly combined with water vapor to form a sulphuric acid aerosol immediately in the atmosphere. Although the asteroid impact created mass destruction at the regional level, it was the global climate change which led to the mass extinction, killing off the dinosaurs along with most other life on the planet at the time, according to researchers. The only way you get a global mass extinction like this is an atmospheric effect.
Scientists explain that the asteroid sparked wildfires, triggered tsunamis and launched sulfur into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. This showed how the blast ignited trees and plants thousands of miles away and that the charred landscape was pulled into the crater with the receding waters of the tsunami. This is four orders of magnitude greater than the amount of particulate matter and the aerosols released by Krakatoa’s eruption in 1883, which caused a 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit average temperature drop for five years.
Scientists have unveiled stunning new research that sheds light on the 24 hours that followed the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. "The asteroid strike 66 million years ago has been compared to the power of 10 billion atomic bombs. The asteroid hit Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. It’s an expanded record of events that we were able to recover from within ground zero”, Sean Gulick, lead author of the study by The University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. ” The impact released energy on the order of billions of atomic bombs. "
New research has found evidence that organisms inhabited the crater only a few years after the extinction-causing impact. Although the asteroid killed off species, new study led by the UTA team, found it contained a thriving ecosystem within 30,000 years – a much quicker recovery than other sites around the globe. Scientists were surprised by the findings, which undermine a theory that recovery at sites closest to the crater is the slowest due to environmental contaminants – such as toxic metals – released by the impact. Instead, the evidence suggests that recovery around the world was influenced primarily by local factors, a finding that could have implications for environments rocked by climate change today. We found life in the crater within a few years of impact, which is really fast, surprisingly fast”, said Chris Lowery, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics ( UTIG ) who led the research into the Yucatan crater.
The Denver Museum of Science and Nature has announced a significant, new fossil discovery documenting the rapid rise of mammals after the KT extinction event which killed over 75% of life on earth. Research on
fossils recently uncovered at Corral Bluffs in the Denver Basin show a much more rapid recovery of both flora and fauna than previously believed after the demise of the dinosaurs. Remarkably, within just several hundred thousand years, both plant and mammal diversity was greater than before for the extinction event with mammals increasing in size one hundred fold.
Corral Bluffs was the site of continuous deposition for one million years from the late Cretaceous to the early Paleocene. Unlike many areas that have deposits from either before or after the asteroid impact which sparked the extinction, the rocks are Coral Bluffs record an unbroken timeline. This is where Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science discovered hundreds of fossils in concretions, including those of mammals, turtles, crocodilians and plants.
With so many different plants and vertebrate fossils to work with, Miller and Lyson were able to construct a remarkably detailed view of how life recovered after the KT extinction event. The asteroid impact that occurred roughly 66 million years ago killed seventy five percent of all life on earth, including the dinosaurs and all mammals larger than a rat. The fossil record of life after that event had previously been sparse and largely disjointed. This is what makes the Corral Bluffs discovery so special. It contains deposits and fossils from both sides of the KT boundary as well as the boundary itself. In addition it contains a very diverse set of both flora and fauna.
See:
https://www.fossilera.com/pages/new-fossil-discovery-shows-the-rapid-rise-of-mammals-extinction
See:
https://sci360.org/a-massive-asteroid-hit-earth-66-million-years-ago/
See:
https://www.seeker.com/asteroid-strike-drenched-world-in-acid-rain-1768371218.html
Did God view the dinosaurs as a dead end among his creations? Then did He, in his wisdom, cause that particular impactor (of some 11 to 81 kilometres (7 to 50 mi) in diameter and having a mass between 1.0×1015 and 4.6×1017 kg) which struck the Earth at a velocity of roughly 20 kilometers per second at an angle of just under 60 degrees at a location featuring sulphur bearing rocks, which would load the Earth's atmosphere with a deadly aerosol of sulphuric acid?
To quote Albert Einstein - "God does not throw dice."
In the case of the Chicxulub impactor, the end of the dinosaurs (with the exception of our avian friends) and the sudden rise of the our mammals and us, God did not throw dice. If you believe the Bible, God created us in His image. If you don't, explain how star stuff gazing upon the Universe is simply the result of myriad throws of an infinite number of evolutionary dice from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens.
Hartmann352