Renée A Duckworth writes:

In certain places around the world – in the Badlands near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in the Geulhemmergroeve tunnels in the Netherlands, or in the Hell Creek formation in eastern Montana – you can touch a thin line of rock, and know you are touching the most famous mass extinction event on Earth. This Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary layer is a seam of clay found all over the world, enriched with iridium – an element that appears on the Earth’s surface only when something from outer space crashes there. It represents a fleeting geological moment, separating the epoch of the dinosaurs from the world we know without them.

While dinosaurs get most of the attention, they weren’t the only ones to disappear. More than half of all life on Earth – from plankton to pterosaurs – perished following the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid that created a 150 km-wide crater in the Yucatán peninsula. It took 30,000 years for life to re-emerge in the fossil record, and another 4 to 9 million years to return to pre-impact levels.

What happened in those first 30,000 years? Some animals were still around even if their numbers weren’t great enough to be fossilised – otherwise we wouldn’t be here today. But what was it like to be a survivor in the aftermath of the catastrophic event?

It probably helped to be a creature that lived underground, given the asteroid impact shot 10 trillion tons of rock and other debris high into the atmosphere. As this debris fell back to Earth, the entire globe was bombarded with superheated projectiles. For those that survived the intense heat of this onslaught, the weather forecast for the next several months would be acid rain, dark skies and below-freezing temperatures as a layer of fine atmospheric particulates and a cloud of sulphuric acid covered the world.

Survivors of the impact – such as the small, rat-like Procerberus – would eventually have crawled out of hiding into the ultimate postapocalyptic environment. Massive fires started by the superheated bullets were still raging. Rotting carcasses and charred remains of those caught on the surface – billions of unfortunate plants and animals – littered every corner. Reliable sources of clean water would have dried up or been contaminated by rock, dust or acid rain.

Survival required ingenuity and flexibility. [Continue reading…]