When the dinosaur-destroying asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, massive amounts of sulfur – volumes more than were previously thought – were thrown high above land into the stratosphere, a new study finds.
in it or when you have so much sulfur, it's gone really high up into an oxygenated atmosphere," Witts said.
Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and it has been enveloped by an oxygenated atmosphere since about"We're the first people to see this sort of thing in much more recent times," at least in sediments that aren't on the Earth's poles, Witts said."You don't see [this signal] in marine rocks," he said.
that followed might not have been as severe," Witts said."And therefore the extinction event might not have been so bad."Previous estimates of the sulfur aerosols entering Earth's atmosphere after the asteroid impact range from about 30 to 500 gigatons; according to climate models, this sulfur would have turned into sulfate aerosols, which would have caused 3.6 to 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit cooling of the Earth's surface for a few decades after the impact.
But the new finding suggests that because the sulfur amount was higher, the climate change could have been even more severe.
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