Scientists collected tens of thousands of plant fossils across Colombia — and found that the same asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs likely helped create modern South American rainforests.
New findings suggest that South America’s lush, varied rainforests were sculpted by the same asteroid impact that likely killed the dinosaurs. This article appeared in the January/February 2022 issue ofA giant asteroid smashing into our planet sounds singularly catastrophic. But it might have also sparked environmental shifts that define Earth as we know it.
Tens of thousands of plant and pollen fossils collected from rocks across Colombia have revealed that the collision — which took place 66 million years ago — led to drastic changes in rainforest plant diversity, according to astudy published in April.
Researchers analyzed thousands of fossilized leaves to determine the asteroid’s impact on plant growth. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute paleobotanist Mónica Carvalho, who led the study, and her colleagues found that the asteroid strike wiped out 45 percent of the plant species in what is now a neotropical rainforest. During the Cretaceous Period, the forests in the region were open canopy, meaning that the ground was open to the skies. The plants found in these forests were a mix of ferns, conifers and flowering plants.
The study isn’t the only one to show how the Chicxulub asteroid impact rippled across the planet. The disruption caused by the collision also led to a massive oceanic algal bloom, fed by nutrients from the impact’s dust and the deep ocean, according to another 2021 study published in June in
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