Sixty-six million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid rocked the Gulf of Mexico and killed the dinosaurs.
And now, new research shows that it only took organisms a mere 30,000 years, a relatively short time, to repopulate the region.
The asteroid melted the crust which led scientists to suspect that life would have had an especially difficult time reemerging in that area – but it returned at the same time as the rest of the world. Researchers studying the Chicxulub crater, the piece of Earth’s crust that holds the imprints of what happened to the world after the asteroid slammed into it, found microfossils that showed how rapidly life reappeared.
“You see that resurgence across the globe,” Dr. Christopher Lowery, who revealed the research during a conference at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conferences in Houston, said in his presentation. “Life returned to that crater very quickly.”
The impact triggered acid rain, forest fires and shot enough sulfur and rocks into the air that it blocked out the sun. “Life was totally obliterated by the impact,” Lowery said. The asteroid itself dissolved on impact, giving Earth’s crust a layer of cosmic dust known as the K-T boundary.
Lowery and his team examined two types of microfossils in the crater, planktonic Foraminifera and calcareous nannoplankton photosynthesizes, to figure out when life started bouncing back. The planktonic Foraminifera stayed in “disaster mode” for five million years, but the latter microfossil came back after just 30,000.
The Chicxulub crater was first discovered in the 1970s by geophysicists looking for petroleum, and it took another 10 years for scientists to make the connection to the calamitous asteroid.
Researchers are now working to determine where exactly that life came from – whether it crawled out of hydrothermal vents formed by the impact, or was washed in from other parts of the ocean.