When the dinosaur-destroying asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, massive amounts of sulfur — volumes more than were previously thought — were thrown high above land into the stratosphere, a new study finds.
Once airborne, this vast cloud of sulfur-bearing gases blocked the sun and cooled Earth for decades to centuries, then fell down as lethal acid rain on Earth, changing the chemistry of the oceans for tens of thousands of years, which is longer than previously thought, the study found.
The findings show that “we’ve underestimated the amount of this sulfur that this asteroid impact created,” study co-researcher James Witts, a lecturer in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol in the U.K., told Live Science. As a result, “the climate change that was associated with it was much greater perhaps than we thought previously.”
The fact that sulfur continued pouring down on Earth’s surface for so long may help explain why it took so long for life, especially marine life, to recover, as some of the sulfur that fell onto the land would have then washed away into the oceans, Witts said.
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https://www.livescience.com/sulfur-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-impact