ЧИКСУЛУБ: 3 минуты, которые убили 75% жизни на Земле

Sixty-six million years ago, above a shallow sea in what is now the Yucatán, a body roughly ten kilometres across entered the atmosphere. On the last evening of the Cretaceous, everything on the coastal plain carried two shadows: one from the setting sun, one from what was coming out of the sky. The crater came out 180 kilometres wide. Three quarters of the planet's species vanished. There were no witnesses, but the trace remained — a centimetre of clay that lies on every continent and holds a metal almost absent from the Earth's surface. This is the story of how the signature of the catastrophe was found ten years before the crime scene. Of the ring on magnetic survey maps that sat in an oil company's cabinet. Of the pink granite raised from a kilometre down inside the crater. Of why it was not so much the asteroid that killed as the rock it happened to hit. And of a metre-thick bed of sediment in North Dakota that formed in a matter of tens of minutes and holds glass droplets in the gills of fish. CHAPTERS 00:00 The evening with two shadows 00:55 A centimetre of clay across the planet 02:00 Iridium and the extraterrestrial signature 02:28 Where the crater went 03:47 The Alvarez hypothesis 05:18 The ring in an oil company's cabinet 07:27 Hildebrand, Haiti and shocked quartz 08:43 Buried Chicxulub and the 2016 drilling 10:52 Why the target was lethal 13:23 Who came through the dark year 14:14 The Deccan Traps and Tanis 15:20 The bone bed of the first hour 17:55 Spring written in bone 19:18 The filters of survival 21:34 The thin line between two worlds SOURCES Alvarez, L. W., Alvarez, W., Asaro, F., & Michel, H. V. (1980). Extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. Science, 208(4448), 1095-1108. Hildebrand, A. R., Penfield, G. T., Kring, D. A., Pilkington, M., Camargo, A., Jacobsen, S. B., & Boynton, W. V. (1991). Chicxulub Crater: A possible Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Geology, 19(9), 867-871. Schulte, P., Alegret, L., Arenillas, I., Arz, J. A., Barton, P. J., ... Willumsen, P. S. (2010). The Chicxulub asteroid impact and mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Science, 327(5970), 1214-1218. Morgan, J. V., Gulick, S. P. S., Bralower, T., Chenot, E., ... Vellekoop, J. (2016). The formation of peak rings in large impact craters. Science, 354(6314), 878-882. Gulick, S. P. S., Bralower, T. J., Ormo, J., Hall, B., ... Wittmann, A. (2019). The first day of the Cenozoic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19342-19351. Collins, G. S., Patel, N., Davison, T. M., Rae, A. S. P., Morgan, J. V., & Gulick, S. P. S. (2020). A steeply-inclined trajectory for the Chicxulub impact. Nature Communications, 11, 1480. Artemieva, N., & Morgan, J. (2017). Quantifying the release of climate-active gases by large meteorite impacts with a case study of Chicxulub. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(20), 10180-10188. DePalma, R. A., Smit, J., Burnham, D. A., Kuiper, K., Manning, P. L., Oleinik, A., ... Alvarez, W. (2019). A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(17), 8190-8199. During, M. A. D., Smit, J., Voeten, D. F. A. E., Berruyer, C., Tafforeau, P., Sanchez, S., ... Ahlberg, P. E. (2022). The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring. Nature, 603(7899), 91-94. Hull, P. M., Bornemann, A., Penman, D. E., Henehan, M. J., Norris, R. D., Wilson, P. A., ... Zachos, J. C. (2020). On impact and volcanism across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Science, 367(6475), 266-272. Chiarenza, A. A., Farnsworth, A., Mannion, P. D., Lunt, D. J., Valdes, P. J., Morgan, J. V., & Allison, P. A. (2020). Asteroid impact, not volcanism, caused the end-Cretaceous dinosaur extinction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(29), 17084-17093. Cheng, A. F., Agrusa, H. F., Barbee, B. W., Meyer, A. J., ... Zhang, Y. (2023). Momentum transfer from the DART mission kinetic impact on asteroid Dimorphos. Nature, 616(7957), 457-460.