Tailor Made Holidays in Mexico: In the News

Did dino-killing meteor strike oil?: 03-06-2008

The meteor believed to have killed the dinosaurs may have crashed into an oil field when it landed in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, reports the Discovery Channel.

The Chicxulub meteor was originally believed to have crashed into a forest, causing massive fires and changing the earth's climate, but smoke-related particles found in sediments at the time of the impact look similar to those from modern high-temperature coal and oil burning, according to the University of Indiana's Simon Brassell.

Today, large oil fields are situated right next to the Chicxulub crash zone and suggest there was plenty of oil in the region at the time of impact.

Despite the new evidence, the presence of a chemical called retene, released by cone-bearing trees when they burn, dated at around the same time as the meteor strike, some experts maintain that vegetation may also have fuelled the fires.

Wendy Wolbach of DePaul University said: "The retene seems to suggest that at least some wildfires burned.

"I think it's probably a combination."

Brassell and his colleagues from the UK and Italy published their report in the May issue of Geology and believe they have found the answer to a debate that has raged since the 1980s, about what sort of fire caused the destruction of the climate.

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