A dinosaur-killing asteroid caused a “massive earthquake” that shook the planet for months

The massive asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs also caused massive earthquakes that lasted for months.

About 66 million years ago, a 6.2-mile (10 km) asteroid collided with Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, plunging the planet into darkness and causing a mass extinction that wiped out 80% of animal life — including all non-avian dinosaurs.

New research presented Sunday (October 9) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) reports that a massive, massive earthquake from the impact left its mark in rocks around the Gulf of Mexico.

Hermann Bermudez, a doctoral student in geology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, has discovered layers of rock in Columbia, Mexico, Texas, Alabama and Mississippi deformed and fractured as a result of the earthquake, some of which are filled with rubble he left behind. A giant tsunami product from the impact of the collision.

Some of these twisted, wrinkled layers also bear evidence of pollen — a sign that vegetation began to recover at least six months after the impact, Bermudez told Live Science. The fact that these layers are distorted even as the plants return shows that the earthquakes caused by the impact lasted for months.

Dinosaur killing power

The influence of Chicxulub – named after the community on the Yucatan Peninsula near the crater left by the space rock – was surprisingly strong. When a piece of the asteroid hit Earth about 66 million years ago, Bermudez said, it released energy equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs and left a crater 110 miles (180 km) wide. The seismic energy was 50,000 times greater than that of the devastating 2004 Sumatra earthquake. The impact caused earthquakes of magnitude 11; For comparison, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded by man was a magnitude 9.5 in Chile in 1960. The Chicxulub effect also caused tsunamis with waves over a mile high.

Bermúdez said there have been sporadic reports of scars left by the catastrophic event in the rock record, but that most such descriptions are relatively few. In 2014, he discovered a layer of rock on Colombia’s Gorgonilla Island speckled with tiny glass beads called tektite and microtectite, which formed when molten rock melted in the atmosphere from the impact and then rained down into a cool spherical shape after the event.

Gorgonilla’s discovery prompted Bermúdez to search for further evidence of that catastrophic day using what he called “old school geology,” or fieldwork on the ground using “the hammer, the map, our shoes, the hat, etc.,” he said at his GSA presentation in Denver on Sunday.

Evidence of ruin

In northeastern Mexico, at the Brazos River in Texas, and at several locations in Alabama and Mississippi, Bermúdez, under the guidance of local geologists, investigated layers of rock dating approximately to the time of the impact, known as the Cretaceous Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary. He found the imprints of the impact: cracks, fractures, and mixtures of rubble and mudstone indicating the passage of a tsunami. Some layers showed signs of liquefaction – a phenomenon that can occur in water-logged sediments during large earthquakes, when the shaking essentially causes the Earth to lose its strength and act as a fluid.

A deformed bedrock on Colombia’s Gorgonilla Island shows that the impact caused the ground to shake for months, even after the vegetation began to recover. (Photo credit: Hermann Bermúdez)

All of the rocks that Bermudez studied were on the sea floor when the impact occurred. Evidence on Gorgonella Island revealed that disturbances persisted long after the initial impact: fern spores that had gradually drifted to the sea floor appear days to weeks after they were released by plants in a layer just 0.4 inch (1 cm) above the K-Pg boundary. This layer is wrinkled and distorted.

“It was shaking when these sediments were settling to the sea floor,” Bermudez told Live Science. Since the fern did not recover for six months to a year after Chicxulub’s impact, the results suggest that the planet kept shivering for months after it collided.

He said Bermúdez will return to Mexico this week to do more fieldwork. He hopes to estimate the magnitude of the massive earthquake after Chicxulub from the rock record.

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