Airborne dust may have killed off the dinosaurs
Perhaps no mass extinction has gotten greater attention (to the chagrin of modern conservationists) than the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, which saw about three-quarters of life on Earth die out after an asteroid slammed into the ocean just off the Yucatán peninsula. This year, a group of researchers posited that dust kicked up by the impact was the main driver of the mass extinction; by their calculations, the dust could have stayed in Earth’s atmosphere for 15 years, blotting out the Sun and thus cooling the planning by about 27 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). You can read more about the team’s findings here.
