Dino-Killing Meteor May Have Struck Oil

May 6, 2008 -- The dino-killing Chicxulub meteor might have ignited an oil field rather than forests when it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, say geologists.

Smoke-related particles found in sediments formed at the time of the impact are strikingly similar to those created by modern high-temperature coal and oil burning, as opposed to forest fires, says Simon Brassell of Indiana University. He and colleagues from Italy and the U.K. published their report on the discovery in the May issue of the journal Geology.

Evidence of some sort of large burn that perhaps created a global climate change at the end of the Cretaceous has been around since the 1980s. But it has not been settled just what sort of fire it was.

"It seemed like (vegetation) wildfires were the easiest solution," recalled geochemist Wendy Wolbach of DePaul University, who worked on evidence of the fires at the time.

There was even the discovery of a chemical called retene which is released by cone-bearing trees when they burn in forest fires today.

However, that was before the Chicxulub crater had been identified. What's more, Wolbach says, it has never been certain that the fires were global, as some have suggested. For one thing, there has never been a lot of fossil charcoal found from that time, which would be expected if there had been so much vegetation burning.

"There isn't enough charcoal to account for that," said Brassell.