So native hypothesis suggested by scientists. A new study led by the University of Texas at Austin confirmed this, finding strong evidence in the hundreds of feet of rocks that filled the impact crater within the first 24 hours after impact.

Evidence includes bits of charcoal, stirring rocks, reverse tsunami flow and noticeably missing sulfur. They are all part of a rock record that offers the most detailed look yet into the aftermath of the disaster that ended the age of dinosaurs, said Sean Gulick, a research Professor at the University of Texas Institute of Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson school of Geosciences.

“This is an extended account of events that we were able to recover within zero,” said Gulick, who led the study and co-led the 2016 international ocean discovery program scientific drilling mission that extracted rocks from the offshore Yucatan Peninsula impact site. “This tells us about the processes of impact from the eyewitness site.”

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 9 and builds on earlier work, co-authored by yodey and led by the Jackson School, that described how the crater formed and how life quickly recovered at the impact site. An international team of more than two dozen scientists contributed to this study.

Most of the material that filled the crater within hours of impact was produced at the impact site or was swept in by seawater pouring back into the crater from the surrounding Gulf of Mexico. Just one day deposited about 425 feet of material—a rate that’s among the highest ever encountered in the geologic record. This breakneck rate of accumulation means that the rocks record what was happening in the environment within and around the crater in the minutes and hours after impact and give clues about the longer-lasting effects of the impact that wiped out 75% of life on the planet.

Gulik described it as a short-lived hell on a regional level, followed by a long period of global cooling.

“We fried them and then we froze them,” Gulik said. “Not all dinosaurs died that day, but many dinosaurs did.”

Researchers estimate an asteroid with the equivalent power of 10 billion atomic bombs the size used in world war II. The explosion ignited trees and plants that were thousands of miles away and triggered a powerful tsunami that reached as far inland as Illinois. Inside the crater, researchers found charcoal and a chemical biomarker associated with soil fungi in layers or just above the sand layers, suggesting signs of deposition as a result of re-contamination of the water. This suggests that the charred landscape was squeezed into a crater with the receding waters of the tsunami.

Jay Melosh, a Purdue University Professor and impact crate expert, said finding evidence of wildfires helps scientists understand that their understanding of the asteroid’s impact is on the right track.

“It was a momentous day in the history of life, and it’s a very clear documentation of what happened at zero,” said Melosh, who was not involved in the study.

However, one of the most important takeaways from research is that there is a lack of core samples. The area surrounding the impact crater is full of sulfur-rich rocks. But there was no sulfur in the core.

This finding supports the theory that the asteroid’s impact vaporized sulfur-bearing minerals present at the impact site and released it into the atmosphere, where it wreaked havoc on Earth’s climate, reflecting sunlight away from the planet and causing global Cooling. The researchers estimate that at least 325 billion metric tons would have been released by the impact. Put in perspective, that’s about four orders of magnitude more than the sulfur that was dug during the Krakatoa eruption in 1883, which cooled The earth’s climate by an average of 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit over five years.

Although the impact of the asteroid created massive destruction on a regional level, it was this global climate change that caused the mass extinction, killing the dinosaurs along with most other humans on the planet at the time.