The Day the Dinosaurs Died (Minute by Minute)

66 million years ago, on an ordinary spring morning, a 10-kilometre asteroid was already falling toward what is now Mexico. Two hours later, three out of every four species on Earth had begun to die. This is that day, minute by minute, exactly the way the rocks recorded it. We start the clock at the moment of impact and follow the aftermath in real geological time: the strike, the sky that fell back down as fire, the fish at Tanis that died with impact glass in their gills within the hour, 3,000 km away, the mega-tsunami, and then the slow, quiet killer that actually finished the dinosaurs: not fire, but darkness. And the twist at the end is that this catastrophe is the reason mammals, and eventually you, exist. ⏱️ Chapters 0:00 The last morning 0:49 T+0 — Impact 2:12 The sky falls back (the broil) 3:13 T+1 hour — Tanis: dead within the hour 4:37 The mega-tsunami 5:42 The sun goes dark 6:47 Impact winter 7:55 The reckoning — ~75% of species gone 9:22 Whodunit? Asteroid vs. the volcanoes 10:16 Rebirth — the survivors inherit the Earth 11:21 An ending and a beginning 12:20 What should we decode next? 💬 If that asteroid had missed, if the dinosaurs had lived, do you think anything like us would ever have existed? And what mystery should we open next? The most requested one becomes the next video. 🔭 Watch next — how life clawed its way into existence in the first place (the other half of this story):    • How Did Life Actually Begin? (The Universe...   Subscribe to Pip Decodes — we turn the universe's biggest turning points into a few quiet minutes that actually make sense. — Sources: Renne et al. 2013 (Science, 40Ar/39Ar date, 66.0 Mya); DePalma et al. 2019 (PNAS, Tanis) & During et al. 2022 (Nature, boreal-spring impact); Range et al. 2022 (AGU Advances, global tsunami); Alvarez et al. 1980 (Science, iridium); Hull et al. 2020 (Science, impact vs. Deccan); Lyson et al. 2019 (Science, Corral Bluffs mammal recovery). All quantitative claims are fact-checked.