What Killed the Dinosaurs? Look at Today's Sky in Northern Ohio

I stepped onto my front porch in Northeast Ohio, looked straight at the sun through a thick orange haze, and started thinking about what actually killed the dinosaurs. The wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada gave me a small, breathable taste of a much larger catastrophe. In this video I use today's smoke as a starting point to think through the K-Pg extinction: what fine particulate soot does in the atmosphere, how the estimated 15,000 teragrams of soot from the Chicxulub impact compares to a full year of all the world's fires and tailpipes combined, and why a year or more of near-total darkness would collapse photosynthesis in the oceans and on land. I also walk through why some organisms made it through and others, like the big active dinosaurs, did not. Chapters 0:00 Introduction — the orange haze 2:04 What killed the dinosaurs? 4:47 From wildfires to an asteroid impact 5:33 What is wildfire smoke? 7:11 Why smoke doesn't fill the atmosphere 9:57 The scale of ancient firestorms 10:34 Soot estimates in teragrams 12:55 A year without sunlight 14:00 What survived the extinction 19:57 A world already under stress ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Duff (aka Dr. Duff or The Natural Historian) resources: About: https://joelduff.org Blog: https://thenaturalhistorian.com Twitter:   / naturalhistoria   Facebook:   / thenaturalhi.  . Photography "Portraits of Creation:" https://www.beechnutphotography.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------