ISTOCK, SOLARSEVENLess than a decade after a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid wiped out 75 percent of life on Earth, including some dinosaur species, sea creatures started to call the impact crater home, researchers report today (May 30) in Nature. The result offers clues to how marine life may respond to a changing climate, the scientists suggest.
The new work reveals “how resilient life can be,” Gareth Collins, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research, tells Science. “Such a rapid recovery . . . is remarkable.”
Study coauthor Chris Lowry, a postdoc at the University of Texas, and colleagues made the discovery after analyzing rock samples taken from beneath Chicxulub crater, which sits in the Gulf of Mexico and was created around 66 million years ago. In the rock were microfossils—the remains of single-celled organisms such as algae.
“Microfossils let you get at this complete community picture of what’s going on,” Lowery says in university statement. “You get a chunk of rock and there’s thousands of microfossils there, so we can look at changes in ...
