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A more recent theory combining both Deccan volcanism and the impact hypothesis has been developed by teams at UC Berkeley led by Paul Renne and Mark Richards. This theory proposes that the impact itself instigated the most intense period of Deccan eruptions, both of which had devastating effects contributing to the K-Pg extinction.
The first breakthrough was published in 1980 by a team led by Luis Alvarez, who discovered trace metal evidence for an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period. The Alvarez hypothesis for the end-Cretaceous extinction gave mass extinctions, and catastrophic explanations, newfound popular and scientific attention. [46]
Some critics of the impact theory have put forward that the impact precedes the mass extinction by about 300,000 years and thus was not its cause. [208] [209] However, in a 2013 paper, Paul Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center dated the impact at 66.043 ± 0.011 million years ago, based on argon–argon dating.
However, several questions remain concerning the best current models of the giant-impact hypothesis. [7] The energy of such a giant impact is predicted to have heated Earth to produce a global magma ocean , and evidence of the resultant planetary differentiation of the heavier material sinking into Earth's mantle has been documented. [ 8 ]
However, the most widely accepted theory for the mass extinction is that an asteroid (or, perhaps a comet) at least 10 kilometers in diameter crashed near modern-day Chicxulub on the Yucatán ...
Ursula Marvin argued that the asteroid impact explanation for the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was at odds with the idea of uniformitarianism and criticized those who attempt to reconcile the two as engaging in "newspeak". [95] Alvarez and Asaro measured the iridium levels of a 57m span of rock near the K–T boundary at Gubbio once more.
A study reveals the chemical makeup of the Chicxulub asteroid that collided with Earth and resulted in the extinction of nearly all dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Dinosaur-killing asteroid was ...
There's plenty of evidence to indicate that a gigantic asteroid likely wiped out the dinosaurs (and many other forms of life) when it smacked into what's now the Gulf of Mexico roughly 65.5 ...