Dinosaur-killing asteroid caused 'mega earthquake' that lasted months - New York Post

Prehistoric Earth definite was rockin’.

New probe has recovered that the dinosaur-killing asteroid, which struck Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula 66 cardinal years ago, besides triggered a “mega earthquake” that shook the satellite for weeks to months aft the collision, EurekAlert reported.

Upon the 10-kilometer abstraction rock’s impact, determination was seismic enactment that was estimated to beryllium 50,000 times much almighty than the devastating 9.1 earthquake that ravaged Indonesia’s Sumatra successful 2004.

Geologist Hermann Darío Bermúdez — who has spent the past twelvemonth passim Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi studying outcrop stone formations that inactive amusement faults and cracks apt caused by the extinction lawsuit — believes this caller batch of information compliments findings of his from the confederate hemisphere successful 2014.

There’s caller grounds suggesting semipermanent seismic enactment from the asteroid that wiped retired the dinosaurs.Getty Images/iStockphoto

While connected Colombia’s Gorgonilla Island, Bermúdez located spherule deposits — different known arsenic stone layers containing tiny solid beads — among much grounds of the monolithic quake. Those beads were a effect of vigor and unit from the asteroid melting into the Earth aft impact, ejecting the molten blobs into the atmosphere, which landed backmost connected the satellite arsenic solid owed to gravity.

He besides recovered shards called “tektites” and “microtektites,” which were launched into the Earth from the asteroid.

The Columbian sedentary stone is believed to “tell a communicative from the bottommost of the ocean,” specifically astir 2 kilometers deep. Layers of mud and sandstone from those millions of years agone stay preserved successful the existent outcrop owed to the shaking of impact, Bermúdez had found.

Intense earthquakes shook the satellite for weeks aft the asteroid impact, caller probe suggests.Getty Images/iStockphoto

“It is 1 of the best-preserved and it was located heavy successful the ocean, truthful it was not affected by tsunamis,” helium said.

Just supra those deposits were preserved spores of fern that signified the archetypal betterment of works beingness pursuing the asteroid’s interaction arsenic well.

New probe suggests that the prehistoric asteroid that wiped retired the dinosaurs caused months of earthquakes arsenic well.Getty Images/iStockphoto

Bermúdez has besides documented grounds of a wide-scale tsunami that was caused by the impact.

It was precocious reported that those floodwaters had changeable up adjacent space and practically flooded the full satellite upon a “mile high” reimpact.