Thirty Seconds Changed Dinosaur History

About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid struck one of the worst possible places on Earth: a shallow-water region rich in sulfur-bearing rocks in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. That target mattered because the impact blasted huge amounts of dust, soot, and sulfur into the atmosphere, cutting off sunlight and helping trigger the mass extinction that killed the non-bird dinosaurs. Scientists have argued that if the asteroid had arrived a little later, even by 30 seconds, it would have hit deeper water, and it may have thrown less of that deadly material into the air and caused a less extreme global disaster.

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