What happened to the dinosaurs when an asteroid about six miles wide struck Earth some 66 million years ago in what is today Mexico is well known: It wiped them out. But the exact fate of our planet’s diverse ocean dwellers at the time — shelly ammonites, giant mosasaurs and other sea creatures — has not been as well understood. New research now makes the case that the same incident that helped bring an end to the reign of the dinosaurs also acidified the planet’s oceans, disrupted the food chain that sustained life underwater and resulted in a mass extinction. “It’s flash acidification, and it transformed ecosystems for millions of years,” said Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist at Yale and one of the study’s authors. But the connection between the crash and the marine extinction has been less solid.

Source: New York Times October 21, 2019 18:56 UTC