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- LONDON
(Reuters) - A vast
methane firestorm ignited by a huge asteroid that
hit the Gulf of Mexico
65 million years ago could have hastened the
demise of dinosaurs on earth,
New Scientist magazine said
Wednesday.
-
- Such an impact, the theory goes, would have sent shockwaves
around the planet, possibly unleashing methane trapped in seabed sediment
and setting the atmosphere ablaze.
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- "This could have
contributed to the demise of the
dinosaurs," Burton Hurdle of the
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in
Washington, told the weekly science
magazine.
-
- Hurdle and his colleagues believe lightning in the atmosphere
could have ignited the gas.
-
- They suggest that vast quantities of rotting vegetation
trapped in sediment far below sea level combined with water to form solid
methane hydrates in the low temperature and high pressure
environment.
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- "As further evidence, the researchers point to an
earlier
discovery of disruption in late Cretaceous sediments (about 65
million
years ago), possibly due to methane release at Black Ridge off
the
coast of Florida," the magazine added.
-
- Other scientists found the
theory interesting but flawed.
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- "I think this idea is very intriguing," said
Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "But
I'm not sure even an impact this big would have liberated that amount
of methane."
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- Evidence is mounting that it was an asteroid strike that
led
to the extinction of dinosaurs. One theory is that the impact of the
asteroid kicked up dust clouds that blocked sunlight and plunged the
planet
into many years of continuous winter that the dinosaurs were
physically
unable to survive.
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