Asteroid dust cloud 'charbroiled' dinosaurs in global firestorm, study finds

Sixty-six million years ago, the end of the dinosaurs was not simply a matter of a mountain falling from the sky — it was a sequence of amplifying catastrophes, each one born from the last. New research from Purdue University reveals that the Chicxulub asteroid's dust cloud did not merely dim the sun and starve the world; it first trapped heat, turning the atmosphere into a furnace that ignited falling debris and sent a global firestorm across every continent. The finding reframes extinction not as a single blow but as a compound sentence written in heat, dust, and fire — and it carries a quie