Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Struck Earth at ‘Deadliest Possible Angle,’ New Research Suggests

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When the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit Earth, it struck at an angle that maximised its destructive potential, according to new computer simulations of the catastrophic event.

The findings, published in new paper on Tuesday in Nature Communications, show that the dino-killing asteroid came from the northeast at an angle of between 45 and 60 degrees. In an associated press release, Gareth Collins, a geophysicist from Imperial College London and the lead researcher of the project, described it as a “worst-case scenario” when it made impact 66 million years ago.

“The asteroid strike unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs,” he said. “This was likely worsened by the fact that it struck at one of the deadliest possible angles.”

The impact delivered copious amounts of carbon dioxide, water vapour, and sulphur into the atmosphere, resulting in an impact winter that wiped out 75 per cent of all life on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs. The buried remnant of this event, the Chicxulub impact crater, is located in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and measures some 150 miles wide.

Scientists have struggled to pinpoint the precise incoming direction and impact angle of the asteroid. This gap in our knowledge prompted Collins and his colleagues to perform detailed computer simulations of the cataclysmic event from the moment of impact through to the formation of the Chicxulub crater.