The Day the Dinosaurs Died by Douglas Preston
“The asteroid was
vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed
a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar
of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within
fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm,
triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material
converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the
entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually
coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the
world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned
across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds
of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep
water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course
of deep-sea drilling.”
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