4.6 billion years ago, in a chaotic solar system, Earth gave birth to , which happened to be in the habitable zone with suitable sunlight and temperature. Comet and asteroid hit the earth, bringing rich liquid water to the earth.
Another hundreds of millions of years later, the first single-cell life of appeared on the Earth's oceans. has since been in the long evolution of billions of years, life has gradually spread from the ocean to the land.
Until 200 million years ago, a powerful reptile animal stepped onto the stage of life on earth and became the overlord of the earth for a time. We collectively call it dinosaurs. There are many types of dinosaurs. has a size ranging from 10 cm to 30 meters and can weigh dozens of tons.
If humans are the top of the earth's life wisdom, then dinosaurs are the representative of their power. Especially the Tyrannosaurus rex of the late Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus family. They have huge bodies and developed facial muscles. The bite force can reach about 120,000 Newtons , making them the most bite force creature in the world. It can be said that at that time, no animal was the opponent of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
However, no matter how powerful an animal is, it is ultimately attached to the earth
If there is turmoil on the earth, even dinosaurs are just meat on the chopping board. 65 million years ago, an meteorite , with a diameter of about 10 kilometers, hit , Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The energy of this meteorite impact is equivalent to 3 billion times that of Hiroshima atomic bomb , extinct 70% of the species at that time, and the era of dinosaurs ended here.
meteorite impact is said to be the most mainstream theory for the extinction of dinosaurs at the moment. We cannot see what happened at that time. We can only find a lot of evidence to support this hypothesis. The huge impact crater of Yucatan Peninsula and the mutation of the climate at that time have provided support for this hypothesis. Recently, Australian scientists found some clues when studying the craters of the moon.
Scientists at the Center for Space Science and Technology of Curtin University in Australia studied the samples brought back by Chang'e-5 , and some of the microscopic vitreous bodies caught their attention. These tiny glass beads are not naturally generated on the moon, but are formed under the high temperature and pressure generated by the impact of fire meteor .
That is to say, by evaluating the age of these glass beads, combining data modeling and geological surveys, the timeline of the moon's impact can be established.
The impact on the moon is related to the extinction of the earth's organisms. Meteorite impact is often not an isolated event. Earth's disaster may be accompanied by a series of small impacts on the moon, which will be affected by meteorite fragments.
The age of some glass beads shows that they formed about 66 million years ago, and 66 million years ago, exactly the time when the asteroid hit the earth. According to scientists' calculations, the 10-kilometer asteroid rushed straight to the earth at a speed of 12 miles per second, and eventually left a huge impact crater on the earth's North American .
Scientists believe that it was not only this asteroid that hit the earth at that time, but other smaller asteroids also rushed to the earth one after another, bringing disaster to the earth together.
Dinosaurs were not extinct at the moment of impact. Only the biological within 1,000 kilometers near the impact point turned into ashes. What is really terrifying is not only the shock wave brought by the moment the meteorite falls, but also a series of chain reactions caused by the impact .
The huge impact triggered a large earthquake and a super tsunami. Scientists discovered sand from the ocean in the terrestrial strata at that time, and plant debris and rocks from the land in the marine strata.
The huge impact force smashed the surface into pieces and threw it into high altitude, then fell down at an extremely high speed, warming up and igniting fire during friction with the atmosphere, turning into a fire meteor and hitting the surface again. meteorite rain such as brought large-scale fire to the earth, and the animals' habitats were devastatingly damaged.
This is just the beginning. The harm of meteorite rain is only regional, and the dust that covers the sky and the sun in the sky is the final fatal blow.
The dust spreads around the world with the atmosphere, triggering global climate change. The dust blocks the sunshine and the heat reaching the surface is greatly reduced. Darkness and cold are coming. Dinosaurs are different from humans. Humans can jump into cold lakes in winter to swim in winter because humans are constant temperature animals, and the temperature in their bodies will not change due to outside the body.
As a warm-changing animal, dinosaurs can have as many degrees as they are outside, so the arrival of cold is fatal to dinosaurs.
On the other hand, the reduction of sunlight weakened the photosynthesis of plants , and a large number of plants died. Then the herbivorous dinosaurs became the first to extinction, and the carnivorous dinosaurs followed closely behind. The era of dinosaur dominance was completely over.
At the same time, mammals also ushered in an opportunity. At that time, mammals were small in size, had a small appetite, and were constant temperature animals. They survived the mass extinction. After the environment gradually improved, mammals developed rapidly, and finally had humans and the current human civilization.
In the past few billion years, the earth has experienced five mass extinctions of organisms. Each time it is a major reshuffle of the ecosystem, with biological extinctions and biological rises. Human beings are the only higher intelligent life on the earth. should learn from the past to avoid becoming a stepping stone in the next major reshuffle.
