Photos The Evidence
What he and his colleagues have found instead are particles called cenospheres, which resemble the sooty output of industrial coal and oil burning, he told Discovery News. When cenospheres are found, they are usually associated with what's called fly ash, which is manmade. "In many places the presence of such material is taken as evidence as the presence of human activities," said Brassell. And since the Cretaceous-Paleogene (a.k.a. Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary is about 65 million years too early for humans and their coal-fired Industrial Revolution, something else had to be burning fossil fuels. Brassell and his team suggest that the Chicxulub meteor crashed into oily shales of the Gulf of Mexico, which caused the oil in the rocks to vaporize and ignite in the air, making cenospheres in the process. Today the large oil fields that edge right up to the Chicxulub structure testify to the ample supply of oil available to burn 65 million years ago. It's even likely the impact itself was responsible for the fracturing and heating of the rocks in that region and allowing the oil to collect into the large pools which are found there today, Brassell explained. The bottom line, said Wolbach, is that the Chicxulub impact and its aftermath were probably a lot more complicated than it they have sometimes been portrayed. "The retene seems to suggest that at least some wildfires burned," said Wolbach. "I think it's probably a combination." Related Links: Discovery News blog: Earth Impacts |
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