What killed off the dinosaurs? This team plans to find out.

In an attempt to find out what killed the dinosaurs, researchers are assembling a drilling rig near Progreso, Mexico designed to drill into rocks that were slammed into by an asteroid around 66 million years ago.

The project is expected to uncover many details about the Cretaceous, when the dinosaurs went extinct, but the team is hoping to learn specifically about the Chicxulub impact, which has been blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs.

What do we need to know?

To be able to understand what occurred during the big modifications in Earth’s past there are two basic time complications to resolve: coincidence and pace.

Researchers must first establish a connection between a suggested cause and its effect. This means a volcanic eruption can’t be blamed for the dinosaur extinction if it happened after they all died out.

Second, researchers must establish how quickly the change happened.

Establishing time frames to determine coincidence and pace has been difficult until recently, now achieving date accuracies of around 13,000 years for dates in the Cretaceous.

Consequently, throughout the last few years, a number of papers has used these new high-resolution techniques to establish the link between many mass extinction events and a massive class of volcanic eruption known as “Large Igneous Provinces” or “LIPs.”

For years, the Cretaceous extinction was thought to be set up by volcanic eruptions in India, and then completed by the Chicxulub asteroid impact in Mexico. Research on a number of other extinctions has now revealed LIP eruptions can indeed cause extinctions without an asteroid impact. Actually, no asteroid impact has been associated with any other mass animal extinction besides Chicxulub, even though there have been quite a number other effects nearly as large.

With the new drilling rig, researchers said they plan to date the rocks melted by the Chicxulub impact in addition to rocks from a smaller Cretaceous asteroid strike in Ukraine, and volcanic rocks from India. Project researchers also said they plan to use both high-precision argon-argon and uranium-lead dating, according to an article in Scientific American.

Given that they get suitable results, this Chicxulub drilling project could resolve a scientific debate that has persisted since the 1980s.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

The post What killed off the dinosaurs? This team plans to find out. appeared first on Redorbit.

redOrbit.com
offers Science, Space, Technology, Health news, videos, images and reference information. For the latest science news, space news, technology news, health news visit redOrbit.com frequently. Learn something new every day.”