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Hi, I'm Thomas Sumner.
I'm the earth and environmental sciences reporter
for Science News magazine.
About 66 million years ago,
there was a devastating disaster on Earth,
and about three quarters of all plant and animal species
got wiped out in a geologic instant.
And that's been a mystery for decades.
And you might have heard in school that everything died
from a big space rock impact,
but not everybody believes that.
And to help answer that question a team of researchers
has gone back to the scene of the crime,
off the coast of Mexico,
this giant 200-kilometer across crater called Chicxulub.
They dropped three giant kind of legs into the sea,
jacked themselves out of the water
so they had a stable platform,
and then drilled straight down
into what's called the peak ring.
It's this ring of mountains within the crater itself.
So in November they reported in Science
that the rocks in this peak ring were from way down,
kilometers down, when the impact originally hit.
And that means that
the simulations of the impact itself are right,
because they predicted that those deep rocks
would be churned to the surface.
And that's really exciting because
it means that the scientists can trust the models
and then they can then use those models to see
how much stuff was kicked up into the atmosphere,
how much energy was released
and what might have happened
to the critters that were alive at the time.
So, in February, I will be putting out a
in-depth feature story looking at this
question of "What killed the dinosaurs?"
And I will be looking both at the new research
coming out of the impact site with the drilling project
as well as some of the first evidence of animals
directly killed by the impact.
They were basically swallowed whole by the tsunami
that came roaring out from the impact site.
And I'll also be looking at the other faction
that has been researching the end of the dinosaurs.
And they do not think it was the impact.
They think it was something else.
And they are currently rallying around the Deccan Traps,
which are these colossal volcanic eruptions
in what is now India, that blanketed the landscape
with kilometers thick layers of lava.
And it was a really, really big eruption,
they are claiming that that eruption
built up CO2 in the atmosphere,
acidified the oceans --
a lot of the same things we're doing right now --
and killed a whole bunch of stuff.
And they're saying that that was the dominant driver
of the end of the dinosaurs.
This drilling project and a lot of other research projects
regarding this horrible extinction event
have already told us a lot,
but there's some big questions remaining
and a lot of findings are just making
those questions even bigger.
So 2017 is going to be interesting one way or the other
whether or or not we really solve
what killed the dinosaurs.
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