AccuWeather Founder & Executive Chairman Dr. Joel N. Myers and AccuWeather Network Chief Meteorologist Bernie Rayno travel back to the age of the dinosaurs to discovery how a comet or asteroid changed everything.
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00:00Welcome to Invisible Iceberg.
00:05On today's show, we're going back to the age of the dinosaur to explore how a comet
00:11or asteroid changed everything.
00:14Plus, in our segment, What If... we look at how life on our planet would be different
00:19if this event never happened.
00:22And we'll reveal some interesting facts about asteroids.
00:27Are we at risk of another one of that size hitting Earth?
00:31It all starts now, on Invisible Iceberg.
00:41A massive comet speeds toward Earth, slamming into Mexico with such force it leaves a crater
00:4790 miles wide in the Yucatan Peninsula.
00:51The impact sends thick, vaporized rock and debris high into the air, setting off widespread
00:56fires, earthquakes, and a tsunami.
00:59There's barely any light, darkness ensues, 75% of the Earth's planet and animal life
01:07perish, including the dinosaurs that roam the planet.
01:12This scenario sounds like a blockbuster sci-fi movie, but it's just one of the true and fascinating
01:17stories in the book Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History.
01:22Joining us right now is Acua, the founder and executive chairman and author of the book
01:26Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers.
01:32Thanks for talking to us today, Dr. Joel.
01:34My pleasure.
01:35We're going to go back to 66 million years ago.
01:41What was life on Earth like during that time?
01:44Before 66 million years, the Earth was teeming with dinosaurs of all sorts.
01:51Huge dinosaurs, some of them 10 times larger than any land animal today, 125 feet long,
02:03weighing 70 tons.
02:06One life form weighing 70 tons, but all types of dinosaurs.
02:13Some that flew, some that were land, some ate just plants, some ate other animals.
02:20They were teeming.
02:21And some of them were getting pretty smart through evolution.
02:24And when we talk about climate change, we usually talk about longer periods of how the
02:31climate changes over longer periods.
02:33How it evolves and changes.
02:34How it evolves.
02:35And it usually is a long period of time.
02:38Well, some of them.
02:39It's interesting.
02:40Some were dramatic, almost at a second change, and others, you're right, occurred, evolved
02:45over hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of years.
02:48But in this case, the climate changed.
02:54Let's talk about that.
02:55It was either a meteorite or a comet hit the Earth at tremendous speeds, hundreds, thousands
03:02of miles a second, and coming in at an angle of 60 degrees to the horizon and struck in
03:09the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula, and it changed everything.
03:13And it was the angle and the location that actually had, let's say, maximum impact across
03:21the world.
03:22Explain.
03:23Well, it hit an area that was high on hydrocarbons, so the tremendous friction and the impact
03:29set it all aflame.
03:30Now, less than 15% of the world has this kind of surface, but in this case, it was a maximum
03:36damage because it set things aflame, and the angle was maximum, too.
03:44If it had come in like this, it would have just dug a deeper hole but wouldn't have sent
03:50as much into the atmosphere.
03:51But since it came in at this angle, it just threw everything into the atmosphere.
03:56According to your book, it said a heat pulse with the force of 100 million atomic bombs
04:01traveled 900 miles in all directions, caused—I mean, that is just—
04:09Think of it.
04:10It's even hard to compromise.
04:11A hundred million, a tenth of a billion atomic bombs.
04:16Think of that force.
04:17So it was devastating to most life on the planet, particularly animal life.
04:22Almost all the animals were wiped out.
04:24You started with a dinosaur, the maximum weighing 70 tons, and the biggest animal left after
04:31everything subsided on the planet was about 55 pounds.
04:35So pretty much everything wiped out across the earth, but yet there was some life that
04:44survived.
04:45Some life survived, and more plant life than animal life, but the basis of life continued
04:53on the planet.
04:54Obviously, we had the same, more or less, atmosphere.
04:57The sun is still there to bring warmth and energy to the earth.
05:02And so gradually, the planet returned to its previous condition over thousands, tens of
05:10thousands, millions of years, but there were different life forms on the planet.
05:15The dinosaurs had been wiped out, and so mammals started to evolve.
05:22What it shows is the earth is a laboratory for life.
05:25Life adjusts and develops through survival of the fittest for whatever climate conditions
05:32exist at that time.
05:34And so we had a new environment, and so new species evolved and developed.
05:42With all of the events that happened in the earth's history, and we go over many of them
05:48in the book here, Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, I don't
05:53think there was anything as extreme as this event.
05:57Am I correct in that statement?
05:59We don't know of any other.
06:01Certainly, within the last 66 million years, there may have been things prior in the history
06:06we just have no record of.
06:08It's a fascinating story, Dr. Joe.
06:11Thanks for telling us.
06:12Stick around, because coming up, we'll be talking about our what-if statement in just
06:16a few minutes.
06:18Here with more insight on this topic is Jack Horner.
06:22He is a paleontologist and dinosaur expert.
06:25Jack, thanks so much for joining us here today.
06:28You're very welcome.
06:30When dinosaurs were here, what was life on earth 66 million years ago?
06:36You know, the world was dominated by dinosaurs.
06:41Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
06:46The world was pretty much ice-free.
06:51There probably was a bit of an ice cap, maybe on the North and South Poles, but for the
06:57most part, it was relatively warm, not extremely hot or anything like that, but pretty temperate
07:08weather.
07:09I mean, you know, we had crocodiles living in what is now Alberta, Canada.
07:14What was the earth like after the strike then, and how did this affect plant and marine life?
07:21Well, you know, it wiped out a lot of marine life.
07:28Most of our, well, all of our marine reptiles, all of the dinosaurs, except their descendants,
07:34the birds, which probably were mostly wiped out themselves, but enough of them lasted,
07:42you know, lived through it that we have birds today.
07:47The mammals seemed to have survived, at least some of them.
07:50You know, it was, after the extinction was over, there probably wasn't much, it took
07:58a long time for life to come back.
08:00The animals that survived were pretty much just lucky.
08:04If the dinosaurs had not been killed off, the mammals would have had trouble surviving.
08:13Well, they weren't having a, they weren't really having trouble surviving, it was just,
08:19they were having trouble, you know, adapting to ecosystems that were, you know, overruled
08:29by dinosaurs at the time.
08:31So, you know, we, it would have been a, you know, it was competition, and the dinosaurs
08:38were the largest animals of the day, and there were small ones as well.
08:44I mean, it, you know, it was a, mammals just, mammals' advantage was they were nocturnal,
08:52and so they lived their lives at night, basically.
08:56You know, that's why our, most of, a lot of our mammals today are, you know, colorblind,
09:02because they evolved from nocturnal animals.
09:07Could science one day bring back the dinosaurs?
09:10Well, you know, there's, pretty controversial.
09:15I've been working on a project to bring back some dinosaur characteristics.
09:19In other words, kind of retro-engineer some characters back into a bird.
09:27And we've been relatively successful at that, but obviously we're not going to, you know,
09:34catch dinosaurs anytime soon.
09:39And as I've stated more recently, I've said that, you know, if we did, we'd probably need
09:46an island.
09:47Mm-hmm.
09:48Yeah.
09:49I was going to say, what advantage would there be to even bringing them back, even a species
09:54or two?
09:55Why would we want to do that?
09:57Well, I would like to have a pet dinosaur.
09:59I don't know.
10:00I mean, you know, we have, we've modified wolves and made, you know, chihuahuas from
10:08wolves.
10:09So I don't see any reason why I can't modify a chicken and make some kind of a dinosaur
10:14like creature.
10:15I mean, that seems like it'd be a kind of a fun pet.
10:20Jack Horner, paleontologist and dinosaur expert.
10:24Thanks so much for joining us today.
10:27You're very welcome.
10:28Coming up, we reveal some interesting facts about asteroids.
10:32Are we at risk of another one of that size hitting Earth?
10:36But next in our What If segment, we look at how life on our planet would be different
10:42if this event never happened.
10:58Welcome back to Invisible Iceberg.
11:05I'm Bernie Raynaud.
11:07It's time for our What If segment.
11:09And we're back with Acua, the founder and executive chairman and author of the book
11:13Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers.
11:18It was the perfect storm, as you mentioned before, the comet and the asteroid, the way,
11:24the where it struck and how it struck.
11:27Let's talk about how things would have been different if just one of those aspects, the
11:31location or even the angle, would have been different.
11:35Well, it certainly was the perfect storm, you said, the asteroid or comet, whichever,
11:40hit the Earth at the angle that maximized the friction and the heat.
11:45It hit an area that was very high in hydrocarbon, so it set off, it burned, you know, tremendous
11:52fire raged and spread around most of the Earth.
11:57It hit an area that was partly water and so created huge tidal waves, perhaps up the
12:03size of a thousand feet that spread out across the oceans.
12:07It was devastating, wiped out more than 75 percent of life on the planet.
12:12But the Earth is a laboratory for life.
12:16And so life sprung back, but in different forms.
12:20After this disaster passed and after all the dust and debris settled out of the atmosphere,
12:26different types of life, different types of plant life, although some survived from
12:31more plant than animal, virtually all the animals, but not all, were wiped out.
12:36And so life sprung back in different forms after that.
12:41And then life comes back.
12:42The Earth starts to recover.
12:45But the history of our planet says there's always other events that can change the course
12:51of history.
12:53There was something else that happened many, many years before.
12:58There was a huge eruption of a volcano, the Toba volcano, which is on the island of Sumatra
13:06in Indonesia.
13:08And that, too, then kind of changed the course of humanity.
13:13So let's think of what happened.
13:14So when the dinosaurs were wiped out, it opened up the era for mammals to develop.
13:21And, of course, the mammals showed up in many different forms and evolved over time.
13:26And humans were mammals.
13:27And so it led to the development of Neanderthals and humans many, many millions of years later.
13:33Of course, humans have been on the planet for well under a million years, perhaps only
13:38a couple hundred thousand years.
13:40So they were appearing and starting to develop.
13:44You know, 66 million and then 200,000 years ago, just a fraction of a million humans appeared
13:51and then 72,000 years ago, which really in the history is not that long ago.
13:57It's 36 times back from when Jesus walked the earth, to put it in context.
14:03And humans were starting to develop.
14:05And then we had the Toba volcanic eruption, which put tremendous debris into the atmosphere,
14:11caused widespread cooling.
14:13Temperature of the earth may have dropped 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
14:16And this was a threat to all types of plant life and food and and humans as well.
14:22And so it's possible a number of humans on the planet because of all this.
14:26The result is from lack of food and sickness and disease and much colder temperatures could
14:33have been down to a few thousand people.
14:36But again, humans somehow bounced back.
14:38But it did.
14:39But that was responsible for the very narrow genomic variation among humans, humans all
14:45over the world.
14:46People don't realize this.
14:47They fight over all these little differences.
14:49But there's less variation in the DNA of humans all over the world than there is of almost
14:56any other species is more variety of other species than it is of humans.
15:02So we fight over look, color of skin, religion and so on.
15:07But yet humans are almost in DNA terms, almost all the same with fascinating.
15:13But they survived that period 72,000 years ago, flourished and control the world like
15:18no species ever has in the history of the planet that we know of.
15:24So you have volcanic eruptions and you also have the comet or asteroid hitting.
15:29They're different processes.
15:31But in a sense, they're somewhat similar in their impacts.
15:36That's correct.
15:37Reading the debris into the atmosphere and how it changes the climate.
15:39Right.
15:41Volcanoes throw dust and gases into the atmosphere.
15:45So some volcanic eruptions can cause tremendous cooling.
15:49If the dust and debris blocks out the sun, causes cooling that lasts for several years,
15:54sometimes could be 10 or 20.
15:55If there's a series of volcanic eruptions, you can bring on an ice age.
16:00But if the gases are prevalent and not the dust, you'll actually have global warming
16:04because they have greenhouse effects and you can have significant warming.
16:08So different volcanic eruptions have different effects.
16:11And there's always a threat of a volcanic eruption causing a significant disruption.
16:16Even today, they cause, they have impact on air, on air flight, airplanes grounded and
16:23so on.
16:24If there was a lot, it's conceivable for a period of time, a lot of the flights worldwide
16:29could be impacted.
16:30And there's always that threat.
16:31And of course, a huge volcanic eruption.
16:34We have an experience.
16:35We've seen Mount St. Helens.
16:37We saw Krakatoa, which caused the year without a summer a couple hundred years ago.
16:42But if Yellowstone were to blow, that's the one, isn't it?
16:45That's the has the most potential globally.
16:49And it seems to blow in one way or another every 600,000 years on average.
16:54But if that were to blow, it will change the climate dramatically and could be a threat
16:58to humanity.
16:59I want to read this passage because I think it's such a powerful statement.
17:04It colors every aspect of the world's various cultures from the clothes we wear to the foods
17:10we eat, to the holidays we celebrate, to the wars we fight and the gods we worship.
17:18Every great empire in history has risen or fallen in part because of changes in climate.
17:25It's a powerful statement.
17:27True.
17:28True all around.
17:30Volcanic eruptions and comets and asteroids, they just show you how quickly, quickly things
17:36can change.
17:37Thanks for telling us the story, Dr. Joel.
17:40My pleasure as always.
17:41After the break, we'll reveal some interesting facts about asteroids.
18:00Welcome back to Invisible Iceberg.
18:06I'm Bernie Raynaud.
18:07While an asteroid ended the dinosaur age, asteroids are still around.
18:12And here's some interesting facts you might not know about them.
18:15First, what are asteroids?
18:18They are large chunks of rock and metal left over since the beginning of our solar system,
18:23about 4.6 billion years ago.
18:26Asteroids orbit the sun in an area in space between Mars and Jupiter called the asteroid
18:31belt.
18:32Second, what do asteroids look like?
18:36Asteroids are sometimes called minor planets, but they are not round like planets.
18:40They have jagged and irregular shapes and often look like huge potatoes.
18:45They have pits and craters and rotate as they travel through space.
18:49According to NASA, the smallest asteroids are about 33 feet across.
18:53The biggest is 10 times larger.
18:55Vesta is 329 miles in diameter.
18:59Finally, could another asteroid hit the Earth?
19:03Bennu is the asteroid closest to Earth.
19:05NASA scientists calculate Bennu will make a close approach to Earth in 2182, more than
19:11150 years from now.
19:13But even then, there's only a slight chance, one in 2,700, that the asteroid will strike
19:19our planet.
19:20In 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned with a sample of Bennu.
19:26Today, NASA scientists are analyzing that space rock for clues about our solar system
19:31and the possible origin of life here on Earth.
19:35I want to thank Acua, the founder and executive chairman and author of the book Invisible
19:39Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers, for joining us today.
19:44For more information and to get your copy of the book Invisible Iceberg, go to InvisibleIceberg.com.
19:51If you have any questions or comments, send us an email at questions at acuweather.com.
19:56We look forward to seeing you next time.