The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs sparked a wave of environmental catastrophes that could have seen parts of the Earth endure two years of darkness, new research suggests.
The research, presented at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting, showed that while the asteroid's impact 66 million years ago was devastating, what followed could have been worse.
The impact would have thrown up vast clouds of rock and acid, but scientists now believe wildfires were a central cause of the wave of extinctions that followed.
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"The common thinking now is that global wildfires would have been the main source of fine soot that would have been suspended into the upper atmosphere," Dr Peter Roopnarine, who presented the research at the meeting, told LiveScience.
"The concentration of soot within the first several days to weeks of the fires would have been high enough to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight to a level low enough to prevent photosynthesis."
The researchers modelled the impact of the darkness across various time periods. They found extinction levels reached up to 81 per cent after 600 to 700 days of darkness, suggesting parts of the earth could have experienced years without light.
Almost all dinosaur species were destroyed by the catastrophe, with only the ancestors of modern birds surviving.
