[Rockhounds] A Rapid End Strikes the Dinosaur Extinction Debate

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The last time the world was ending, two cataclysms aligned. On one side of
the planet, a wayward asteroid dropped like a cartoon anvil, punching
through the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula and penetrating deep into Earth’s
crust. Around the same time — 66 million years ago — a million cubic
kilometers of lava were in the process of bubbling up to the surface,
releasing climate-altering carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere
and forming what would become the Deccan Traps of modern-day India.

Rock layers around the world show what happened next. No dinosaurs besides
the birds made it out. Neither did the squidlike ammonites that curled like
rams’ horns, or marine reptiles including the plesiosaurs (Loch Ness
conspiracies notwithstanding). But because of the close timing of the
asteroid and the volcanism, geologists have spent years staking out
increasingly acrimonious positions on which one deserves the blame for the
ensuing carnage. In 2018, *The Atlantic* called the debate “The Nastiest
Feud in Science
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/>
.”

Until recently, Pincelli Hull
<https://people.earth.yale.edu/profile/pincelli-hull/about> kept out of the
fray. In her subfield, marine plankton fossils, the impact was considered
the obvious sole cause of what’s called the Cretaceous-Paleogene
extinction. Instead, she focused on understanding how life bounced back,
not on what had almost snuffed it out. “There was a lot to be done without
really ruffling any feathers,” said Hull, a paleontologist at Yale
University.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/pincelli-hull-explains-how-an-asteroid-killed-the-dinosaurs-20200325/