Why was an asteroid with only a 10-15 km (7-8 mile) width able to wipe out the dinosaurs and cause the extinction of 75% of all species on Earth?

Question

That width is less than the distance I drive from my house to the grocery store. Why was that size of an asteroid able to cause such catastrophic damage?

In: 21

Answer 1

You have a huge amount of kinetic energy. Like with a nuclear explosion but scaled up incredibly it threw millions of tons of debris into the air. The bigger pieces of debris quickly fell back onto the earth creating other smaller impacts. The sheer friction of all those pieces reentering the atmosphere heated the planet up like an oven so much of the surface was literally cooked. Then the smaller particles from the initial impact lingered creating a long, long winter and it blocked out the sun. This causes plants to die off.

There have been times that a big volcanic eruption caused mild global cooling for a short period of time. But the asteroid impact 65 million years ago was vast compared to a single volcanic eruption