Not by asteroid alone: Rethinking the Cretaceous mass extinction
(PhysOrg.com) -- At the end of the Cretaceous period some 65 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into Mexicos Yucatan Peninsula, causing severe but selective extinction. While that is widely accepted, it has remained unclear exactly what the mechanisms were that caused extinction of ocean-dwelling organisms. Proposed explanations include global darkness due to blocking of sunlight with resulting interruption of photosynthesis at the base of the food chain, deadly radiation due to ozone destruction, global cooling or warming, and ocean acidification). Various widely-accepted hypotheses focus on a collapse of the primary and export productivity in the oceans such as the so-called Strangelove Ocean or Living Ocean hypotheses, respectively but do not account for the finding that deep-sea floor dwelling phytoplankton-dependent benthic foraminifera did not undergo significant extinction. Recently, however, research conducted at Universidad Zaragoza in Spain compared benthic foraminiferal records with benthic and bulk stable carbon isotope records....