William sent in a couple of nice links to the following story – go to www.yahoo.com/news/eyewitness-asteroid-killed-off-dinosaurs-161449999.html and https://www.yahoo.com/finance/m/c16bf09f-f24d-315d-af0b-b1a5f4e63fb0/sci… …dswhich concerns the K/T impact that contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs – and 75 per cent of life on Earth (an estimate). Rocks near the asteroid crater tell a story after being analysed by scientists. Geologists are saying that a mile high tsunami wave, wild fires, and the release of many tons of sulphur (blotting out the Sun and creating a nuclear winter scenario) came in the wake of the asteroid strike. The Chicxulub asteroid was around 6 miles wide. Within a minute it had bored a hole 100 miles wide on what is now the sea floor – creating a bubbling pit of molten rock and hot gases. The contents of that fiery cauldron shot into the sky, creating a large plume. Within further minutes the plume collapsed and solidified into rippling peaks of lava and rocky material. These peaks were then mothered my more rocks, along with traces of the scorched landscape, and charcoal.
The space rock most likely vapourised the surrounding land and sent ocean water rushing from the impact point at the speed of a jet aeroplane. Although many animals did die at the impact site it is evident that the mass extinction was caused by what happened in the atmosphere (gases such as sulphur). See also https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-discover-new-evidence-of-the-ast… … where we learn that in the Chicxulub crater geologist found that hundreds of feet of sediments built up rapidly – 130m in a single day. It ocurred on the scale of minutes and hours (and this is a geologist telling us). As the hours passed a backwash of waves added more and more finely graded debris.See also https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2019/09/rocks-at-asteroid-im… … evidence of all this comes from small pieces of charcoal embedded in rocks, jumbles of rocks brought in by the tsunami back flow and an absence of sulphur (denuded at impact and blown into the sky).