The Day the Dinosaurs Died – Minute by Minute

one of the greatest illusions in life is continuity 66 million years ago the continuity of the dinosaurs had been going on for around 165 million years already and it didn't seem this would change anytime soon the world was warm and pleasant and most of the land was covered with lush forests and an incredible diversity of trees flowers ferns and trillions of critters dinosaurs were ubiquitous and had diversified into hundreds of species of all shapes and sizes titanators large gentle giants shared the world with famous beasts like tyrannosaurus rex or edmontosaurus hectinodon hunted in the undergrowth while edmontosaurus wandered coastlines and swamps an ancient paradise a world of plenty full of life 66 million years ago maybe on a tuesday afternoon life was the same as it had been the day before or a thousand years before or pretty much a million years before things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies until a tiny tiny detail in the sky changed [Music] if there were dinosaurs watching the stars one night they may have noticed the appearance of a new star a tiny dot that for many weeks slowly became bigger and brighter until one fateful day it looked like another small moon in the night sky and then it faded from sight as it dipped into earth's shadow for a few more hours the illusion of continuity was upheld until it was not anymore in the morning the object suddenly appears again now almost as large as the sun in the sky and growing every moment heading for the coast near the yucatan peninsula it takes the asteroid only seconds to pass through the thin layer between space and the ground to make contact as it enters the atmosphere at almost 60 times the speed of sound let's stop time here we see the unnamed asteroid about to commit specieside larger than mount everest it reaches from the ocean high into the atmosphere higher than passenger planes would fly millions of years later at this moment the world was one way in a fraction of a second it would be fundamentally different let's make the transition as the asteroid hits the shallow ocean and the bedrock below the energy of billions of nuclear weapons is released all at once as the asteroid vaporizes a flash of light illuminates the sky as an eerie bright white sphere grows over the gulf of mexico bedrock melts into seething hot plasma at tens of thousands of degrees celsius the thermal radiation from the explosion travels at the speed of light and immediately burns everything within a radius of about one thousand five hundred kilometers while the energy from the impact pushes so hard against earth's crust that it loses all strength and flows away from the impact site like a liquid creating a hole 25 kilometers deep and 100 kilometers wide the ocean is pushed back for hundreds of kilometers like when a kid jumps into a puddle as the crust bounces back melted and flowing crust forms a temporary mountain stretching 10 kilometers into the sky an incredible amount of material is blasted into the higher atmosphere or even out into space as much as 60 times the original mass of the asteroid the violence of the strike is felt everywhere on earth within minutes a magnitude 11 earthquake may be the most powerful quake any living thing has ever witnessed in billions of years it is so insanely strong that in india it might have shaken gigantic lava fields and causes volcanic eruptions that would last for 30 000 years and cover half of the indian subcontinent with lava even on the side of earth opposite the impact the ground still moved by several meters nobody would sleep through this day the gigantic explosion crashes against the atmosphere with unprecedented violence and causes a shock wave that reaches speeds of more than 1 000 kilometers per hour near the site of impact similar to the hyper hurricanes on gas giants like neptune in middle america basically any soil vegetation or animal is just shredded into pieces and catapulted thousands of kilometers away now the previously displaced oceans return as the temporary mountain at the site of impact collapses a ring of tsunamis as high as one kilometer enough to cover all skyscrapers humans would ever build heads in all directions as they crash into the coasts of the continents surrounding the impact they will drown thousands of kilometers of coastline 15 hours later some of the waves that get refracted around south america will still tower as much as 100 meters into the sky but we still haven't talked about the worst thing yet a lot of the debris heated into space will orbit earth for thousands of years some may hit the moon or even mars but most of it comes right back when things fall through the atmosphere at such speed they get very hot as in hundreds of degrees hot and this happens to millions of tons of material everywhere this rapidly heats up the atmosphere to insane temperatures we don't know exactly how hot it got or how long this heat shock lasted but there are two ideas here either the air was heated to hundreds of degrees for a few minutes or two thousands of degrees for around one minute in any case the air became as hot as the inside of an industrial oven how bad the global effects of this were is contested but if enough heat reached the surface a lot of plants and animals would have died very quickly if they couldn't bury themselves or escape into caves the heat together with raining debris also may have ignited material on forest floors and sparked wildfires as the earth rotated under the searing hot blue in a few hours massive wildfires were probably burning around the globe some of them may have lasted for months and turned earth into a horrifying hot hellish version of itself as the day of the impact draws to an end many of the dinosaurs are already dead but the worst is still to come the gigantic plume of vaporized material reaches the upper atmosphere and spreads around the whole globe together with the soot from the burning planet and the aerosols generated at impact the planet sinks into a deep darkness with only the remaining raging fires illuminating the scenery whatever plants survive the firestorms will now be starved for sunlight as global photosynthesis is temporarily shut down within days temperatures crash as much as 25 degrees celsius the oceans were especially hard hit the lack of sunlight killed over 90 percent of plankton which formed the basis of the food web of marine life ultimately this would kill off the large marine reptiles and ammonites that used to dominate the seas the biosphere the survivors now find themselves in is like an alien landscape ash debris and the burned remains of the formerly lush and blooming life cover the ground the sky is dark and it's cold and fresh food is scarce while fungi thrive for months and years the planet will be a hostile and deadly place the sudden global winter will last for decades at least 75 percent of all species on earth will just vanish from existence and so as the day ends the world is suddenly different the continuity that went on for millions of years is no more the era of the dinosaurs is over just like that eventually from the ashes of the old world survivors emerged birds that are the direct descendants of the dinosaurs and mammals that would eventually become the dominant animals on the planet without the asteroid who knows what life on earth would look like today without the sudden disruption of dinosaur continuity that completely changed the planet and all life on it we might have never had the opportunity to become what we are today it's not clear how long the human error will last so far modern humans have been around for 0.1 percent of the time the dinosaurs were and in this short amount of time we've achieved impressive feats from making the world our own to reaching space and splitting the atom yet our future and our long-term survival are not a given if we're not careful it could end in an instant like the age of the dinosaurs ended but in contrast to them we know that our continuity is fragile even if it doesn't feel like it we can be prepared and be vigilant and hopeful if we're lucky our journey will go on for a long long time speaking of journeys we want to address something in the spirit of transparency koskazak has changed in the last two years we've become more than a youtube channel or animation studio and now also run a paper shop that sells hundreds of thousands of calendars posters and notebooks that's not a happy accident many of us have a background in graphic design paper products are our roots and we actually started out creating posters books and print infographics we love that you can touch them smell them nerd about small details and printing techniques just like the channel we started small and without great ambition step by step we found the right printers and papers learned about shipping and expanded our shop we put a huge amount of research love and hours into it because this is the only way we know how to do things we don't just want to make generic merge we want to make things that fit our mission of making science exciting and creating beautiful things things that persist and are made with high quality and love our shop gives us another outlet to do this and as a nice side effect has turned into our main source of income for everything we do on this channel which also keeps us independent and our videos free for everyone so we want to build further on that and create more things that last we've just started a new notebook line called pocket log that will expand on in the future the first edition is a dinosaur themed collection that will hopefully serve a future paleontologist well there are loads of plans for sciencey stuff more journals and calendars and infographics let us know what you would like us to make for your room kids classrooms and yourself in the end the things we do work because you like them and because you enable us to put thousands of hours into videos and hundreds of hours into posters and journals thank you so much for that we're looking forward to making fun sciency stuff for you no matter if it's a video a poster or something else entirely thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Views: 9,224,535

Rating: 4.9727111 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: dFCbJmgeHmA

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/djbandit]

The Day the Dinosaurs Died – Minute by Minute66 million years ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before or a thousand years before or pretty much a million years before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies. Until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed.

Sources & further reading: https://sites.google.com/view/sourcesdinosaurapocalypse/

Pinned comment by Kurzgesagt:

Ohai! So a few more words about our announcement at the end of the video. If you haven’t watched it, here is a summary: Our shop has grown a lot over the years and it is kind of a big deal for us. Check it out here: https://kgs.link/dino We genuinely love creating sciency products that you can actually touch and we are constantly working on expanding it further.

Because you guys support us directly we are able to grow our team, consistently improve our research process, spend more time on fine-tuning the animations, working on improving our craft wherever possible. And release our content for free and stay independent. Genuinely thank you so much for that.

Email us and let us know what sort of education or science related products you’d love to see in our shop the future: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

[u/R2CX]

This is adorable and horrifying in equal measure. I love it.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Epicorax]

I would love to have a video talking about why mammals became the dominant species on the planet. To my knowledge there are many other animals who also evolved to big forms (like gigantic birds). Why didnt they dominate mammals?

[u/notathrowaway75]

Eventually, from the ashes of the old world survivors emerged.

I'd like to see a video on that.

[u/anoobypro]

Ahhh the animation is so beautiful

[u/Trilian_S]

Yeeted Yeeees please

[u/Vostok32]

Y E E T

[u/ArghNoNo]

This is a great video.

I suspect the claim that the asteroid was visible for "weeks" before impact is wrong. As the video says, the impactor was an asteroid slightly larger than Mt Everest - a big thing on Earth but a tiny speck in the Solar System. 24 hours before impact, at a speed of 20 km/sec, it was ~1.7 million kilometers away - four and half times the distance to the moon! Unless I am missing something here, the asteroid would only be visible from the ground hours or minutes before impact, depending on its surface albedo.

Perhaps the popular science book given as source for this claim based it on the now largely abandoned theory that the impactor was a comet.