期刊
JOURNAL OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
卷 172, 期 2, 页码 175-185出版社
GEOLOGICAL SOC PUBL HOUSE
DOI: 10.1144/jgs2014-082
关键词
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资金
- Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (PyroMap) [PCIG10-GA-2011-303610]
- European Research Council Starter Grant [ERC-2013-StG-335891-ECOFLAM]
- University of Exeter
- Leverhulme Trust
- EPSRC Doctoral Prize from Imperial College London
- Lise Meitner Program of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
A large extraterrestrial body hit the Yucatan Peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous period. Models suggest that a substantial amount of thermal radiation was delivered to the Earth's surface by the impact, leading to the suggestion that it was capable of igniting extensive wildfires and contributed to the end-Cretaceous extinctions. We have reproduced in the laboratory the most intense impact-induced heat fluxes estimated to have reached different points on the Earth's surface using a fire propagation apparatus and investigated the ignition potential of forest fuels. The experiments indicate that dry litter can ignite, but live fuels typically do not, suggesting that any ignition caused by impact-induced thermal radiation would have been strongly regional dependent. The intense, but short-lived, pulse downrange and at proximal and intermediate distances from the impact is insufficient to ignite live fuel. However, the less intense but longer-lasting thermal pulse at distal locations may have ignited areas of live fuels. Because plants and ecosystems are generally resistant to single localized fire events, we conclude that any fires ignited by impact-induced thermal radiation cannot be directly responsible for plant extinctions, implying that heat stress is only part of the end-Cretaceous story.
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