Title: The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs

Speaker: Professor Birger Schmitz (Lund University, Sweden)

Time: 14:00pm, April 15, 2024

Location: 3-302, PMO Xianlin Campus

Abstract: It is now 45 years since Physics Nobel Prize laureate Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, geology professor in Berkeley, presented data indicating that the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago because of the collision between Earth and a 10-km-sized asteroid. Dinosaurs had ruled higher life on land for 160 million years, but now their demise opened for the mammals to expand, leading eventually to today's civilization upheld by sapiens. Here I will summarize some of the latest discoveries, like the 200 kilometer-sized Chicxulub crater in Mexico and remarkable tsunamis deposits in North Dakota that allow a detailed reconstruction of what happened on Earth minute-by-minute after the impact. I will tell about the ongoing studies at PMO that have revealed the type of asteroid that hit Earth and from where in the solar system the body came. I will also discuss whether perhaps a dinosaur-based civilization would have evolved instead of a sapiens civilization, had the asteroid missed Earth.