Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Imagine you're a dinosaur, let's say an Alamosaurus, around 66 million years ago. The sun has set and you're minding your own business, just lumbering around an area that will eventually be called Austin, Texas, when something glowing in the sky catches your eye. You're not too concerned, but you keep an eye on that weird glowing star for a couple of hours anyway. The thing is, that star keeps getting brighter, but it doesn't seem to be moving, so you forget about it. Then out of nowhere, around 60 hours later, you feel the thunderous boom of a supersonic shock wave. That thing you hoped might be a routine shooting star is actually an asteroid around 6 miles wide-- 6 miles wide. Before you can even think "what the hell was that?" the thing you thought was a star 60 hours ago plunges 18 miles into the Earth, and you die immediately. Today we're going to do a step by step breakdown of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. But before we get started, now is a great time to subscribe to our channel, "Weird History." Leave a comment and let us know what you think about this video or tell us what weird phenomenon or person you'd like us to cover next. Now, onto the disastrous event which some scientists say nearly demolished Earth before it even really had a chance to make it as a planet. The Chicxulub asteroid slammed onto the coast of Mexico and killed just about everything on Earth. The first thing Earth felt before the Chicxulub asteroid struck was its violent shock wave. Because the air in front of the asteroid was compressed and unbelievably hot, it blasted a hole through the Earth's atmosphere, causing the mother of all shock waves. Naturally, ground zero absorbed the asteroid shock wave first with a sudden spike in air pressure, which ruptured lungs and other internal organs of every living creature within a 1500 mile radius. But that wasn't even the worst of it. Not long after you, the leaf-eating Alamosaurus died from the pulverizing shock wave, the 6-mile wide asteroid plunged onto the shore of what we now refer to as the Yucatan Peninsula, which is about 200 miles west of Cancun. Immediately after the asteroid-- which, by the way, vaporized upon impact-- smashed into the rim of the Gulf of Mexico, the Earth rebounded from the impact and the peak of its crust briefly rose higher than Mount Everest before it broke apart and fell back to sea level. The energy produced from the impact of the explosion was equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT, roughly 7 billion times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. But the blast didn't look like the kind of atomic explosion you're familiar with-- you know, the all too-familiar mushroom cloud. Instead, the impact looked more like a rooster tail made up of molten material. A lot of the molten debris was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within 1,000 miles. What molten debris? Good question. Once the asteroid hit Earth, the force kicked back 25 trillion metric tons of rock ash and shot debris into the Earth's atmosphere. An inverted cone of liquefied molten rock shot up into the sky. The heat turned the molten rock into little red hot beads of glass. Scientists call them tektites, and after they reached the peak of their trajectory, they began falling back down to Earth at 100 to 200 miles per hour. Jan Smit, a retired professor of sedimentary geology from Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, who is considered the world expert on tektites, studied the North Dakota fossil site and says the fish got it the worst from the tektites found there. "Paddlefish swim through the water with their mouths open, gaping, and in this net, they catch tiny particles, food particles, in their gill rakers, and then they swallow, like a whale shark or a baleen whale. They also caught tektites. That by itself is an amazing fact. That means that the first direct victims of the impact are these accumulations of fishes." Smit also noted that the buried body of a Triceratops and a duck-billed hadrosaur proves beyond a doubt that dinosaurs were still alive at the time of impact. It's theorized that it rained the very same tektites for nearly an hour, and set everything that came in contact with on fire. While the tektites were busy setting fire to the Earth, the heaving ocean turned into a towering tsunami tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland, and then sucking it back out into deep water. Less than 10 minutes after impact, a 30-foot wave pounced on what we now know as fossil site North Dakota, nicknamed Tanis after the lost ancient Egyptian city. The wave threw thousands of fish onto a sandbar, trapping them as the water receded. They struggled to breathe, but their gills were clogged with tektites, essentially suffocating them. Approximately 20 minutes after the asteroid's impact, a second wave reached North Dakota's fossil site, burying the beached fish under a pile of gravel, sand, and dirt. The massive disruption created a fossilized graveyard. The fossils show fish topped on top of each other with scorched tree trunks, insects, part of a Triceratops, and mammals. The lucky dinosaurs died upon the impact of the asteroid. The dinosaurs that lived had a rough couple of months. Debris from both the asteroid's impact in the Western Hemisphere and volcanic activity in the Eastern Hemisphere blocked out the sun's light. The plants that survived impact died from lack of light. Without any vegetation, surviving herbivores succumbed to starvation, and the carnivores quickly followed. Scientists have hypothesized the mass extinction eliminated 75% of all species and wiped out 99.9999% of all living organisms. For many years after, the Earth was toxic. Due to the asteroid's heat and impact, many minerals vaporized and released dangerous gases into the atmosphere, including greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane. One of the more immediately damaging effects, however, was from sulfur. Sulfur was introduced into the water cycle, creating sulfuric acid and causing subsequent acid rain. About 45 minutes after impact, a thunderous blast of wind would tear through ground zero at 600 miles an hour, blasting debris everywhere and leveling anything that might still be standing. The sound of the explosion would arrive at the same time, around 105 decibels, about as loud as if you were standing underneath the rotors of a Huey helicopter. For the first few hours, there would have been close to total darkness. But soon after that, the sky would begin to lighten. For anyone or anything out of range of the direct effects of the asteroid explosion, one would be treated to the sight of dark skies and a display of shooting stars created by the impact debris raining back on Earth. They wouldn't have looked quite like regular shooting stars or meteors though. Meteors burn up at higher speeds and get hotter. These shooting stars would have been re-entering the atmosphere at lower altitudes, traveling slower and emitting infrared radiation. The best guess is that the atmosphere would have been some sort of red glow. After the red glow, the sky would darken as ash and debris swirling around the globe created a creeping twilight. During the following weeks, months, and maybe even years, the skies were probably somewhere between twilight and a very cloudy day. Once the dust literally settled, one of the more distinctive clues that the asteroid left us was a thick layer of clay packed