Dinosaurs were wiped out as Earth’s surface sloshed like liquid, scientists found

Dinosaurs were wiped off the earth when an asteroid hit 66 million years ago. Now, scientists have more information about what actually happened upon the impact that caused the giant creatures to go extinct.

The surface momentarily started acting like a liquid, moving back and forth, a new study found. Scientists were examining pink granite found in the ring in the mountains in Mexico that formed when the asteroid hit Earth. The mountains were formed when the impact made a 60-mile-wide hole and pushed the earth’s surface outward.

The pink granite was found in a layer of rock that traditionally wouldn’t have been seen so far from the earth’s center, indicating the impact caused material from deeper down to rise to the surface.

Geophysicist Sean Gluck told NPR that “it was plain as day” when scientists were examining the pink granite samples found in the Chicxulub Crater in the Yucatan Peninsula off Mexico’s coast.

“It was just so obvious, even on the drill floor when we’re out there, out in our hard hats and so on, looking at these cores coming up,” the University of Texas, Austin scientists said. “Everybody staring at it went, ‘Wow, there’s the answer. It’s from deep.’”

To visualize what happened when the asteroid hit, imagine an ice cube dropping into a glass of water. As the cube falls, liquid surrounding it rushes in to fill the hole and then bounces back up. The surface of the earth essentially acted in that fashion as if it were a liquid, even though it remained solid the entire time.

“And this all happens on the scale of minutes, which is quite amazing,” Professor Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London told the BBC.

Gravity pulled the sides of the crater down to the center, which then bounced back up momentarily to a height surpassing that of the Himalayan Mountains. The granite, which looks just like a countertop, came from six miles below the surface.

Scientists hope the information will help them better understand what they find on the surfaces of other planets, which are scattered with craters.

This story was originally published November 23, 2016 at 10:31 AM with the headline "Dinosaurs were wiped out as Earth’s surface sloshed like liquid, scientists found."