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Asked by Slender246 to Matthew, Francesca, Laura, Andrew, Rebecca on 18 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by swag, 492spea43.
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Andrew McKinley answered on 18 Nov 2014:
It is widely believed that the dinosaurs died out as the result of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. It is suggested that this impact happened somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico (the Chicxulub impact). The asteroid was so massive that it sent shockwaves around the world, a resulting firestorm that destroyed forests and killed millions of beasts around the world, and so much dirt and dust thrown into the atmosphere that it blocked out the sun for years on end, causing the global temperature to plummet!
Scary stuff… Even scarier when you know that, actually, exactly the same thing could happen tomorrow! Makes you want to appreciate today all the more!
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Matthew Camilleri answered on 18 Nov 2014:
As Andrew replied it is probably an asteroid, but nobody is entirely sure. It is very difficult to actually get correct data from rock samples dating a few million years old.
Unfortunately if it was a meteorite we still have no defense mechanism of what we can use to stop it, and it might spell the end of humanity. An actual meteor storm is also recorded in the Bible, when Lot had to go away from a village as a rain of fire was falling down on the village because of god’s wrath. That only destroyed a village, but bigger meteors can actually do enough damage to cause another mass species extinction.
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Laura Schofield answered on 19 Nov 2014:
Probably an asteroid. The boys are right that if another asteroid were to hit Earth, we’d probably all get wiped out too! But we have an advantage over the dinosaurs that we have a lot of satellites and telescopes that track asteroids, comets and meteors so we’d have fair warning. Our only hopes of survival would be to either knock it off its course or blow it up into much smaller pieces that would either be burnt up in our atmosphere or land on Earth without causing too much harm. There was a film called Armageddon that dealt with this problem made in 1998. It’s a great film if you want to know what Hollywood thinks we would do!
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