Ok, kids, story time, I love story time.
Sixty six million years ago, it was a perfect day.
Dinosaurs roamed the earth, tending to their young feeding, enjoying the warmth of the
sun. Fish and sea creatures weave through tangled algae in the deep blue waters of the
ocean. Tiny mammals burrowed in holes deep in the ground, snug and safe from the
predators lurking above, and then in one second the world ended.
Let's find out why. Welcome to the Y files were smart folks like us come to laugh and
learn. Sixty six million years ago, the entire course of history on our planet changed.
In an instant, a giant asteroid almost 20 kilometers wide, or about twice the size of
Mount Everest, smashed into the earth at 12 miles per second per second.
That's over fifty thousand or forty times the speed of sound.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What happened?
Well, chaos happened.
Chaos that would cause mile high Surinamese across entire oceans and walls of fire across
entire continents, chaos that would wipe out 70 percent of life on earth, chaos that
would kill the dinosaurs and chaos that would change our planet forever.
The asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, resulting in a massive explosion that
created one of the largest known impact craters on Earth at ninety three miles in
diameter. This happened just outside the little town of modern day chick shlub Mexico.
This catastrophic event is known as the shlub impact.
What kind of little chicks you got it.
The estimated energy of the impact was somewhere between two and over 50 yards of jewels
is a lot of jewels, a lot of jewels.
Oh, yes. Let's keep it conservative and say the impact was to Yatta jewels.
That's the same as 40 billion times the energy delivered by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima,
40 billion times.
And all of that energy occurred in less than one second all at once.
The Cretaceous period, which lasted about 80 million years and did the very second this
asteroid hit the earth. This gave way to a new era, an era of calamitous death and
destruction of massive craters and flaming forests of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
This moment, the moment of the Chichibu impact, marked the beginning of the Setas
Ogiwara. The blast was so extreme that in the sky above it where there should have been
er, the rock had punched a hole of outer space in vacuum.
And as the atmosphere rushed in to close the hole, enormous volumes of Earth were
expelled into orbit and beyond all within a second or two of impact.
Now this material which included pieces of the asteroid itself, were set aflame and
rained back down on the earth as fiery rock each chunk the size of a skyscraper.
The impact had other disastrous consequences.
A mega tsunami over three hundred and thirty feet tall erupted from the sea and stretched
all the way from Mexico to Texas and Florida.
And that was lucky. Lucky the water in the Gulf of Mexico is relatively shallow.
If the asteroid had struck in the Pacific Ocean, it would have unleashed tsunamis five
kilometres high.
That sounds high it and it's higher than most aircraft fly.
Oh, boy. Is it over yet?
Oh, no. It's just getting started across land for thousands of miles.
Death was instant.
And this is shown by fossils discovered in soil samples from New Jersey, which is thirty
one hundred miles away.
Now, while some life survive the impact, there was an immediate mass extinction of
millions of species.
As for the dinosaurs, no one knows whether their species died out all at once or if it
took weeks to fully eliminate them.
But either way, this was the day the dinosaurs died.
When the asteroid hit, it plunged deep underground.
Less than one second later, superheated dust, ash and steam exploded from the depths of
the crater and were thrown high into the earth's atmosphere.
And rocks at the impact site contain large amounts of sulphur that went vaporized led to
a sulfate haze that spread across the entire surface of the earth and led to years of
environmental conditions that would suffocate even more life on the planet known as an
impact winter. The dust, ash and haze blocked out the sun, creating a decade long winter
across the entire planet.
Winter is here. My father always promised the plants just couldn't grow in these
conditions and the food chain was demolished.
It was impossible for dinosaurs to survive if they didn't die immediately after impact.
They were definitely wiped out by the end of the impact winter.
How does winter kill animals?
We have with us all the time, at least once a year.
Well, this winter was different.
It lasted years and there was no sun.
It was darkness without sun.
Photosynthesis stops without photosynthesis.
Plants die without plants.
Animals die without animals.
Bigger animals die across the entire planet.
Food wasn't just scarce.
It was gone. That things get better yet.
No, they get worse.
It allowed particles and gases released by the many, perhaps thousands of volcanic
eruptions decimated the Earth's climate.
Poisonous snow fell around the world for years.
Seas turned acidic.
Air was barely breathable.
Plants and animals that didn't freeze suffocated or starved the animals that died on the
day of the impact were the lucky ones.
As winter finally end, I mean, did they kill the Nightengale?
Whatever? Yeah, eventually things get warmer.
The happy ending, at least sauna.
The volcanoes were also releasing carbon dioxide.
So once the impact. Particles had evaporated from the atmosphere, the CO2 remained,
creating a runaway greenhouse effect, so the planet began to warm again.
Now surviving life forms, most likely species that live beneath the surface, are
protected from the blast and its aftermath by deep dens.
And they had a chance to prosper at the end of the winter, cold blooded reptiles who
could not generate their own body heat at a far smaller chance of survival.
This period of warming led to the creation of new fertile habitats across the globe, and
any life that had survived so far thrived.
Once again, this new version of the Earth looked completely different from the days of the
dinosaurs. Predatory birds and reptiles no longer dominated the food chain.
Mammals were prospering.
The version of the earth that we know today had finally begun.
The chick shlub impact, which has been theorized for decades, was only recently discovered
in 1978, geophysicist Glenn Pinfield and Antonio Camargo were working for the Mexican oil
company Pemex as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico scouting
possible locations for oil drilling.
Their data showed a large concentric set of onshore gravity anomalies looked an awful lot
like an impact crater. About the same time, Nobel Prize winning geologist Luis Alvarez
and his son Walter were studying chemicals in the soil when they discovered large amounts
of iridium dating back to sixty five million years ago.
That's what Captain America Shield is made.
That's vibranium. Iridium is an element that's rare on Earth, but it's commonly found in
meteors, superheros, a commonly found in meteorites.
OK, OK, you're excited about MCU Phase four, but let's let's stay focused.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Go ahead. It was then that Luis Alvarez theorized that a massive asteroid might have hit
the earth at the beginning of the Cenizo era.
The same iridium was found in soil all around the globe, and it contained large amounts of
soot, which would indicate forest fires across the planet during the same time.
Also, grains of quartz were found within the soil that had been deformed by high
shockwaves, common during explosions.
Now, in 1990, scientists finally confirmed the massive crater now buried under deep layers
of limestone. They did this by drilling and mapping gravity fields over the Gulf of
Mexico. Still, there's no complete certainty about dinosaur extinction.
Nobody knows if they were killed in an instant or in a month or over the course of years.
Most of them probably died during the impact winter.
It's crazy to think that a nice day can turn catastrophic in an instant, but it can.
One geophysicist said it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was
already over by the next.
Now the worst disaster movie Hollywood could ever create.
Shrek would not even come close to the destruction, the nightmare, the absolute horror
that was unleashed that day literally out of the blue.
If there's a lesson to be learned, it's late today.
Like tomorrow is going to suck.
Amen, brother. Our existence is fragile.
There are millions of asteroids in the solar system and they range in size from small
pebbles up to 600 miles across much larger than the Shlub asteroid.
In fact, there are almost two million asteroids in our solar system that are one
kilometer wide or larger.
And many asteroid orbits intersect with the Earth's meteor showers like the Leonids and
the Perseids and others occur when the Earth flies through debris fields in space
weather. So you're saying this could happen again?
There's no doubt about it.
There have been other mass extinctions that remain mysteries to this day.
About two hundred and fifty million years ago, it's believed that around 90 percent of
species were eliminated during a period called the Great Dying.
Meteors impact the Earth every day, and they've been doing so since the beginning of
time. So it's not a question of if another large impact is going to occur on Earth.
It's just a question of when NASA tracks the orbits of thousands of celestial objects.
There's been some pretty close calls over the years, and I don't mean 40 years ago or 60.
I mean last July, asteroid 20, 19, OK, missed the Earth by 45000 miles.
That's much closer to us than the moon.
And this thing was moving at almost 90000 KPA.
Now, even though it was relatively small, it had the energy of 30 times the atomic blast
that Hiroshima. It was called a city killer.
In August of twenty twenty, an asteroid the size of a truck passed only 800 hundred miles
above the Indian Ocean.
That's closer to us than a lot of orbiting satellites.
That's a close shave.
It was. There are some scientists, many scientists who believe that the greatest threat
to our civilization is not war or plague or climate change, but another meteor impact.
And fortunately, we had the technology to venture to asteroids and potentially even
change their trajectory.
We will get this job done.
Your gone, but these projects are expensive and spectacular impacts are so rare that
there's not a lot of support for this type of initiative, but there probably should be.
Now, if we could take a break from fighting with each other for just a minute and turn
our eyes skyward, we might see that every human being, every form of life on this planet
has a common enemy.
And it's just a matter of time before that enemy comes knocking.
Thanks for hanging out with us today.
My name is A.J. That's Hellfish.
This has been the wave files we covered a lot today.
They got me thinking about potential new videos and let me know in the comments if you'd
like to learn about how we visit asteroids, the potential for mining them and how we can
avoid the type of impact that threatens all life on the planet.
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Until next time, be safe, be kind and know that you are appreciated.