The origins of this article were from my geoscience class on Earth’s climate: past, present, and future. It struck me that many people still don’t understand how the dinosaurs actually went extinct, and that it did happen millions of years ago for that matter.

I also thought it’d be fun to correlate the resemblances I saw during this writing to the world we live in today. I didn’t intend to involve politics originally, but it was only fitting as I realized it is a primary factor that would be today’s “asteroid.” Nonetheless, I believe it to be a fun read, as I hope you do as well.

At the end of the Cretaceous period (145-65 millon years ago), a mass extinction event caused 76% of all species to become extinct. There are two primary factors why: massive volcanism and an epic extraterrestrial collision with Earth’s surface.

The first factor was volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India erupted 250,000 years before the asteroid impact and continued for 500,000 years after. Models from a team of scientists from the University of Lausanne have concluded dangerous levels of volatile chemicals would have gone into the air, poisoning the atmosphere and oceans. The team also compared the numbers as “something similar to what’s happening today: lots of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere very rapidly.”

The second factor, the Chicxulub impactor, occurred about 65 million years ago (66,038,000 to be more precise) and was an asteroid-sized at 10 km (6 miles) in diameter that struck the Earth in the Yucatan Peninsula in what’s now Mexico. This incident forever changed the history for which living organisms would rule the planet, and for good reason -- mammals wouldn’t have dominated the planet thereafter.

The impact event and previous volcanic eruptions correlated to 76% of all species becoming extinct from the Cretaceous period during what was one of many relatively warm periods in Earth’s history (4 degrees Celsius above today). The evidence for this derives from iridium deposits, grains of quartz and the crater itself.

Late Cretaceous Period

Iridium is an element that’s rare on Earth but some 10,000 times more abundant in meteorites. Geologists have found deposits of iridium in thin sedimentary layers across the globe that marks what is called the K-Pg boundary, the end of the Cretaceous and date for which an asteroid or comet struck Earth.

Found near the crater are quartz grains with shock lamellae textures that form only by sudden shock wave pressures, and are larger than those found anywhere on Earth. The crater itself is 180 kilometers (km) and is evidence of the speed of the asteroid: 20 kilometers per second (44,640 miles per hour). So what made the dinosaurs go extinct was an epic asteroid collision that engulfed the Earth in flames for millennia, right?

Photo on the right: blue means low-density pulverized rock (lowest gravity) & red means higher-density rock (highest gravity). Green is in between.

Well, there’s still more to the story other than a fiery city-sized rock hitting the Earth’s surface. Yes, the instantaneous effects would have been a penetrating hole through the atmosphere that would have sent a shock wave flattening anything for hundreds of miles around the impact site. The earthquake thereafter would have measured 11 on the Richter scale, 100 - 1,000 times stronger than any recorded earthquake. There was also hot debris that stayed in the atmosphere heating the planet up, oh, and the first days would have also caused massive wildfires that could have spanned globally.

However, these would all be effects that would only have months or no more than a year of significant damage.

Years later there would still be soot and dust particles drifting in the atmosphere. The lower atmosphere, or troposphere, would have cleared up in just weeks. The upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, would have stayed for years because unlike the tropospheres rainfall capability the stratospheres altitude has no clouds, thus leaving the slow pull of gravity to mitigate the small particles.

Blocking the sun for years, global temperatures would have plummeted and most of the vegetation leftover from the fires would have died off. Here in America we all just witnessed a solar eclipse. Temperatures dropped and came back rather quickly, the dinosaurs had to wait years instead of minutes like we did with the eclipse.

All in all, this would have been at most a ten year span, more than enough time to kill off large creatures such as dinosaurs. The planet was already much warmer and with carbon dioxide (CO2) levels increased by the impact and from wildfires the planet only grew warmer to the already warm climate-adapted organisms.

So what the heck does this have to do with the world we live in today? Well one comparable aspect is were entering the sixth mass extinction of Earth’s known history. The end of Cretaceous is ranked only four whereas the end of the Permian, or better know as “the great dying,” is certainly the number one.

Scientists today believe natural extinction rates to be one to five species per year, but it’s now estimated that we’re losing 1,000 to 10,000 species a year. At this rate 30-50% of all species could become extinct by mid-century alone. This is due to human activities such as habitat loss, introduction of invasive species and of course climate change. This all entails biodiversity, which ensures ecosystem resilience that helps cope with stress factors on a particular environment.

As the Deccan Traps of India were altering climate 65 mya so are humans today. Industrialization, agricultural farming/ranching, deforestation, ocean acidification, increased storm systems and wildland fires all contribute to steady, yet quick environmental stressors that occurred similarly from Deccan Traps. If climate change is what exemplifies Deccan Traps then nuclear warheads are what exemplify the Chicxulub impactor.

As nuclear warfare has always been on the table since the end of WWII people have been daunted by the risk of repercussions that would follow such an event. The Doomsday Clock, which indicates 12:00 being nuclear war, has now listed 2017 at two and a half minutes, the lowest it's been since 1984 and 1953.

Kim Jong-Un’s missile tests and Donald Trump’s rhetoric have escalated the nuclear debate. North Korea is a threat, but not so much to the U.S. and its immediate allies, besides Japan. The U.S. alone has 4,600 nuclear warheads with 400 of them ready to launch on any given notice.

Kim Jong-Un observes a missile test in Aug., 2017

As we approach the first quarter-century mark it is evident that environmental factors are altering climate and ecosystems faster than species can keep up with. The combination of nuclear war could be the final blow like the asteroid was for the dinosaurs. If worse came to worse and the U.S. does launch nuclear warheads on the Korean Peninsula then yeah we wouldn’t be dealing with the same threat as an asteroid. However, just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were gateways to nuclear acceptance so would be North Korea’s demise.

Whether you care or not what the U.S. did in 1945 one thing is a fact: we are the one and only country that have dropped the bomb when we probably didn’t need to on innocent lives.

Times were different then and times are different now. Our president is not a politician with foreign diplomacy and comes off as a hot head. I believe most of it is just show, as he became famous and rich again from a show. Yet, he is the one and only man that has that final decision to use the world’s most infamous weapon. If this scenario happened then again the U.S. would be the guinea pig for other countries to think it’s alright to use nuclear weapons as a force. China would certainly think less of us, which could mean potentially thousands of warheads being sent across the world creating dust clouds that cover the atmosphere for years, bringing our global “civilized” planet to our knees -- or destruction.