00:04A giant meteor may have wiped out the dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago, but now experts
00:09are saying that the size of the impactor might not matter. We believe the dinosaurs died because
00:13when an asteroid hit the earth, it sent a cloud of dust into the air. That cloud blacked out the
00:18sun and killed much of the plant life on the planet. Then the herbivores didn't have anything
00:22to eat and so on. So the bigger the asteroid, the bigger the dust cloud, the bigger the extinction
00:26event, right? Well, maybe not. Researchers found that a 30 mile wide impact crater, the fourth
00:31largest ever discovered, had no impact on global life. It just carried on. Meanwhile, another that
00:37was half its size coincided with an extinction period 5 million years ago. So what gives?
00:42Apparently potassium feldspar. Researchers looked at evidence from all known extinction events over
00:47the last 600 million years, finding that if a meteor hit an area rich in potassium feldspar,
00:51an extinction event would occur. Potassium feldspar can be found in about 60% of Earth's crust,
00:57but when aerosolized into the atmosphere, it can drastically change the way clouds are formed,
01:02and in turn, Earth's atmosphere in general.
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