• Question: Why did an asteriod hit Earth and kill the dinosaurs?

    Asked by howbenek1 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by imctaggart.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      There are loose rocks flying around in the solar system all the time, and crashing into all the planets and moons occassionally. Not as many impacts happen these days, because there are less loose rocks, they have either already hit, or they have found a nice orbit that avoids all the planets…

      65 million years ago, a big rock about 10km across hit the earth, and it would have flattened anything underneath it, but it would have also thrown up a lot of dust into the atmosphere, stopping sunlight getting through, and making it very cold on earth. The dinosaurs probably died from the cold then 🙁

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Pure bad luck.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Well the honest answer is that it just happened….. there are a lot of asteroids and comets floating around in the solar system, and one day a big one was on a collision course with the Earth. It’s very rare, and very unlikely to happen any time soon, but one day another big asteroid or comet will happen to be on a collision course with Earth again….

      You just have to hope that by then we’re either gone already, or have figured out how to stop it actually hitting….

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Every so often the Earth suffers a mass extinction, sometimes because of massive volcanoes that cause climate change by acidifiying the oceans, sometimes because of changes in how much sunlight we get that causes massive global cooling and freezing the entire planet, and sometimes because a big asteroid smashes up the surface.

      But basically, it is bad luck.

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