Here’s what happened in the impact crater the day it did in the dinos
Geology is a big science. The Earth is a large enough place today, but when you stretch the fourth dimension back across many millions of years, the largeness can get out of hand. Because we lose a lot of detail to the ravages of time, it's very difficult for geology to get small again—to tell us about what happened in individual locations or over short periods of time.
So it's not every day that you read a scientific paper titled "The first day of the Cenozoic." The Cenozoic is the name geologists give to the era spanning the last 66 million years, and it started with the mass extinction event that killed off (most of) the dinosaurs. There were incredible eruptions that contributed to the extinction event and spanned a considerable amount of time.
But the asteroid that struck off the coast of what is the Yucatán Peninsula today was the opposite—it couldn't have been much more sudden. A recent drilling project recovered a long core of rock from the Chicxulub impact crater, leading to greater clarity about how the calamity played out—including on that first day.
