An asteroid that killed dinosaur triggered a mega earthquake too 

How many times have you ended up watching Jurassic Park movies? Too many times, isn’t it? Well, dinosaurs do have that intriguing thing to them. Now, tell us something else. Have you ever experienced an earthquake? Assuming you have, here’s something fascinating that scientists have discovered recently.  

A mega asteroid sized 10 kilometres had hit the Earth (more specifically off the coast of Gulf of Mexico) around 66 million years ago and had completely wiped down the last existing species of dinosaurs. But that isn’t all that the giant asteroid, now being called the Chicxulub impactor, did. It had also triggered a mega earthquake, something that was unknown till date.  

In fact, it may have just been the biggest and most destructive earthquake the world has ever witnessed and released about 100 billion trillion joules of energy. This means that this mega earthquake just didn’t shake the ground for a few seconds or a minute like most present-day ones, but shook the Earth for weeks or even months at a stretch, thus leading to the permanent extinction of dinosaurs (often called Cretaceous-Paleogene or K-Pg mass extinction event) alongside leading to the deaths of three quarters of the then surviving species on Earth. Sounds totally bizarre, isn’t it? Well, to make matters even simpler, it was almost 50000 times more powerful than the one that happened in Sumatra in 2004. It was deemed as one of the strongest earthquakes in the modern times and had a magnitude of 9.1 on the Richter Scale.  

These latest findings have been credited to researchers based at the Geological Society of America (GSA) and was presented by geologist Hermann Bermudez (also associated with Montclair State University, New Jersey) during a recent GSA Connects meeting in Denver, USA. It was traced after years long deep analysis of prehistoric geological sites located at Texas, Alabama and Mississippi where the team found fossilised faults and cracks. Moreover, earlier research on the effects (such as signature of liquefaction or overflowing of water-saturated sediments) of the same asteroid’s impact in Colombia (Gorgonilla Island) and Mexico (3000 kilometres from the modern-day Mexico City) were also taken into account. It had revealed that the mega asteroid had such an effect that it left millions of layers of sediments (such as tektites and microtektites) alongside deposits of spherules. 

For those unaware, spherules are tiny glass beads (resembling sand grains) that are formed when heat and pressure from a massive impact melt substances from the Earth’s crust and eject it into the atmosphere. Here, they gradually cool down and take the shape of glass beads and again fall back upon the Earth.  

Interestingly, such deformed deposits have also been traced below the ocean, implying that the asteroid had triggered underwater tremors and might have even caused tsunamis.