This is almost sheer Velikovsky. At http://phys.org/print387788915.html … the headline is, did a burning oil spill wipe out the dinosaurs. It seemed to me at first the author of the study had read Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision in another life (when he was a student perhaps) and it had got lodged in a a deep recess inside his head, only later re-emerging with the author unaware of W in C. Burning oil fires were a peculiarity of Velikovsky's Exodus catastrophe – what is the chances of the same idea occurring in two different points of time by two different sets of people.
A new study by Kunio Kaihu and team was published in Science Reports this month and it suggests the K/T boundary event (involving an asteroid or comet slamming into the Gulf of Mexico) produced lots of soot. This has generally been interpreted as soot from landscape fires caused by excess heat as the object sheered through the gases of our atmosphere. Apparently chemical analysis seems to show the soot was derived from hydrocarbons – as in crude oil. However, it is at this point the study diverges from Velikovsky as the asteroid strike site in Yucatan is surrounded by rich oil reserves – such as Venezuela and Texas and a large offshore Mexican oil field just down the road from Chicxulub. Unlike Velikovsky who pictured burning oil descending out of the sky, raining fire like napalm on the world below, the new study has the oil having an origin in the Earth itself. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill leaked 4.9 million barrels from just a tiny hole in the floor of the Caribbean – the Chicxulub crater is 180km across. The heat and violence of the impact would have instantly ignited oil, they go on, , creating clouds of black soot that blocked out as much as 50 per cent of sunlight. This means firstly that temperatures would have plummeted – instantaneously, and would also have affected plant growth and therefore food sources.