If the dinosaurs didn’t die in a firestorm 65 million years ago, they died in an oven.
New research appearing in the December issue of Geology suggests that the heat from the asteroid impact — blamed for extinguishing most life on the planet at the end of the Cretaceous period — wasn’t enough to ignite worldwide wildfires, as previously thought.
“We can’t say that the whole world spontaneously ignited,” says lead author Tamara Goldin of the University of Vienna. “That doesn’t fit with these current numbers.”
Earlier models, developed by coauthor Jay Melosh of Purdue University and colleagues in the early 1990s, found that the rain of red-hot debris from the impact would radiate so much heat that the surface of the Earth would feel like an oven set to broil (260Ë Celsius) for at least 20 minutes — long enough and hot enough to directly ignite wood. The world’s forests would go up in flames, the model projected, and any unsheltered creatures would be burnt to a crisp.