Damage calculation for asteroid hit: The Dinosaur's story

One lie we have always believed is continuity. Like 65 millions years ago, giants reptile were roaming the Earth. Dinosaurs had been ruling the planet for 165 millions. They existed in a world which was surrounded by trillions of plants and trees, billions of species of animals, and moving tectonic plates. How fascinating it is that there was a time when 60 ft Titanosauria shared the land with the beast like Tyrannosaurs, or like velociraptors hunted under green shades with theropods. All this seemed that was stuck in unending time. An ancient paradise, a world of plenty, full of life. 66 millions years ago, life was as same as it had been a day before, or thousand years before or pretty much a million years ago. But some day. most probably in afternoon, this frozen time was broken and changed the whole course of planet.

Velociraptors

Tyrannosaurs Rex

Titanosauria

Theropods

Before collision to Earth

If dinosaurs looked at night sky just like we do, they would had observed a very bright star. Every day, its size would had increased. Then after few days, it would just disappear from the sky and during next day's afternoon, a fireball whose size would look greater than sun would come near every seconds to Earth. It has been calculated that asteroid's speed before its collision to Earth would had been 60 times the sound of the Earth. Finally, it crashed near the Yucatan Peninsula. Now this is called Chicxulub crater.

Yucatan Peninsula

Size of asteroid:

Even larger than size of the Mt. Everest.

Few seconds after collision

Just few seconds after collision, things were changed fundamentally. When asteroid hits the ocean floor, the energy equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs. A flash of light illuminates the sky as the eerie bright white sphere of light appears. The rockbed at gulf of Mexico melts into lava at the thousands of degree celsius. The radiation emitted by that collision travelled at the speed of lights and eradicated whole area with the radius of 1500 Km. While the energy from impact pushed so hard against Earth's crust that it lost all the strength and floated away the site of impact like a liquid, creating a hole 25 kilometres deep and 100 km wide. The ocean was pushed back to like hundreds of Km, just like when a kid jumps into a puddle. When asteroid vaporized, the ocean bed formed a mountain and then got back to normal. An incredible amount of material is blasted into higher atmosphere or even out in the space, whose mass was equivalent to 60 times of the mass of asteroid. The violence of this strike was felt everywhere at Earth within seconds, 11 point earthquake, most probably the most powerful earthquake felt by any species in the billions of years. This earthquake was so powerful that it might have triggered volcanoes in Indian peninsula that erupted lava for 30,000 years and places which were far from volcanos were no haven as the ground moved by several meters which might have killed uncountable species. But it was just the start point of mass extinction.

Ring of Cenotes tells the size of the crater

Aftermath of collision

After collision, the 1000m high tsunamis, higher than any skyscraper humans will ever make, were formed and moved in all directions, destroying every last essence of nearby coastlines.

Effects on land:

But we still haven't talked about the worse things yet. Remember that lot of debris which was blasted into atmosphere. Few of them crashed to moon and to Mars also, but lot of them came back to Earth. When things fall through the atmosphere at such speeds, they get very hot, like hundred of degrees. And this happens to materials which were worth of billions of tons. This rapidly heated up the atmosphere to insane temperatures . We still don't know exactly how hot it got or how long this heat shock lasted but there are only two possibilities. Either the air was heated to hundred of degrees, for a few minutes or to thousand of degrees in one minutes. But in any case the whole planet had become an industrial oven. In result, a lot of animals and plants had died quickly except those who escaped into some caves. The heat with falling fireballs had also set forest fires all over the globe. In few hours, the planet had experienced the drop of oxygen as it was burnt to make CO2 due to forest fires. Some wildfires might had lasted for months, making a hellish place to live for survivors. As the day of the impact was coming to end, huge population of dinosaurs was wiped out from the face of the Earth for ever. But the worst had yet to come.

Effects on atmosphere:

The gigantic flume of vaporized material reaches the upper atmosphere and spreads around the whole globe. Together with the soot from the burning planet and the aerosols generated at impact, the planet sinks into deep darkness, with only raging fires illuminating the scenery. Whatever plants survive the initial stages, will now be starved for sunlight as global photosynthesis is shut down.

Effects beneath the sea floor:

The oceans were specially hit hard. The lack of sunlight killed over 90% of planktons which form the basis of the food web of marine life. Ultimately this would kill off the large aquatic dinosaurs and ammonites that used to dominate the sea.

Ammonites

Mosasaurus

For months and years, the world would had remained a hostile place for survivors. The cold winters would have lasted for decades. At least 75% of species on earth went to extinct. The continuity that went on for millions of years, was just no more. And Just like that era of dinosaur met an end.