The Illusion of Continuity#

One of the greatest illusions in life is continuity. About 66 million years ago, the continuity of the dinosaurs had been going on for around 165 million years already, and it didn’t seem like this would change anytime soon. The world was warm and pleasant, and most of the land was covered with lush forests and an incredible diversity of trees, flowers, ferns, and trillions of critters.

Dinosaurs were everywhere and had diversified into hundreds of species of all shapes and sizes.

• Titanosaurs, large, gentle giants, shared the world with famous beasts like Tyrannosaurus Rex or Edmontosaurus.
• Pectinodon hunted in the undergrowth.
• Edmontosaurus wandered coastlines and swamps.

It was an ancient paradise, a world of plenty, full of life. 66 million years ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before, or a thousand years before, or pretty much a million years before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies.

A Tiny Detail in the Sky#

…until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed everything. If there were dinosaurs watching the stars one night, they may have noticed the appearance of a new star. It was a tiny dot that for many weeks slowly became bigger and brighter. Eventually, one fateful day, it looked like another small moon in the night sky. And then it faded from sight as it dipped into Earth’s shadow. For a few more hours, the illusion of continuity was upheld… until it was not anymore.

Contact! The Moment Everything Changed#

In the morning, the object suddenly appears again, now almost as large as the sun in the sky and growing every moment. It was heading for the coast near the Yucatan Peninsula. It would take the asteroid only seconds to pass through the thin layer between space and the ground to make contact. It entered the atmosphere at almost 60 times the speed of sound.

Let’s stop time here. We see the unnamed asteroid about to commit species-side. It was larger than Mount Everest. It reached from the ocean high into the atmosphere, higher than passenger planes would fly millions of years later. At this moment, the world was one way. In a fraction of a second, it would be fundamentally different.

The Immediate Blast#

Let’s make the transition. As the asteroid hits the shallow ocean and the bedrock below, the energy of billions of nuclear weapons is released all at once. The asteroid vaporizes.

• A flash of light illuminates the sky as an eerie bright white sphere grows over the Gulf of Mexico.
• Bedrock melts into seething hot plasma at tens of thousands of degrees C.
• The thermal radiation from the explosion travels at the speed of light and immediately burns everything within a radius of about 1,500 km.
• The energy from the impact pushes so hard against Earth’s crust that it loses all strength and flows away from the impact site like a liquid, creating a hole 25 km deep and 100 km wide.
• The ocean is pushed back for hundreds of kilometers, like when a kit jumps into a puddle.
• As the crust bounces back, melted and flowing crust forms a temporary mountain stretching 10 km into the sky.
• An incredible amount of material is blasted into the higher atmosphere or even out into space – as much as 60 times the original mass of the asteroid.

Global Shockwaves and Destruction#

The violence of the strike is felt everywhere on Earth within minutes.

• A Magnitude 11 earthquake, maybe the most powerful quake any living thing has ever witnessed in billions of years. It is so insanely strong that in India, it might have shaken gigantic lava fields and caused volcanic eruptions that would last for 30,000 years and cover half of the Indian subcontinent with lava.
• Even on the side of Earth opposite the impact, the ground still moved by several meters. Nobody would sleep through this day.
• The gigantic explosion crashes against the atmosphere with unprecedented violence and causes a shockwave that reaches speeds of more than 1,000 km per hour near the site of impact, similar to the hyper-hurricanes on gas giants like Neptune.
• In Middle America, basically any soil, vegetation, or animal is just shredded into pieces and catapulted thousands of kilometers away.

The Returning Ocean and Giant Tsunamis#

Now, the previously displaced oceans return as the temporary mountain at the site of impact collapses.

• A ring of tsunamis as high as 1 km, enough to cover all skyscrapers humans would ever build, heads in all directions.
• As they crash into the coasts of the continents surrounding the impact, they will drown thousands of kilometers of coastline.
• 15 hours later, some of the waves that get refracted around South America will still tower as much as 100 meters into the sky.

The Raining Heat#

But we still haven’t talked about the worst thing yet. A lot of the debris ‘yeeted’ into space will orbit Earth for thousands of years. Some may hit the moon or even Mars, but most of it comes right back. When things fall through the atmosphere at such speeds, they get very hot – as in hundreds of degrees hot. And this happens to millions of tons of material everywhere.

This rapidly heats up the atmosphere to insane temperatures. We don’t know exactly how hot it got or how long this heat shock lasted, but there are two ideas here:

1. Either the air was heated to hundreds of degrees for a few minutes.
2. Or 2,000 degrees for around 1 minute.

In any case, the air became as hot as the inside of an industrial oven. How bad the global effects of this were is contested, but if enough heat reached the surface, a lot of plants and animals would have died very quickly if they couldn’t bury themselves or escape into caves.

Global Wildfires and Darkness#

The heat, together with raining debris, also may have ignited material on forest floors and sparked wildfires as the Earth rotated under the searing hot blue. In a few hours, massive wildfires were probably burning around the globe. Some of them may have lasted for months and turned Earth into a horrifying, hot, hellish version of itself. As the day of the impact draws to an end, many of the dinosaurs are already dead.

But the worst is still to come. The gigantic plume of vaporized material reaches the upper atmosphere and spreads around the whole globe. Together with the soot from the burning planet and the aerosol generated at impact, the planet sinks into a deep darkness, with only the remaining raging fires illuminating the scenery.

The Sudden Global Winter#

Whatever plants survived the firestorms will now be starved for sunlight as global photosynthesis is temporarily shut down. Within days, temperatures crash as much as 25°C.

The oceans were especially hard hit:

• The lack of sunlight killed over 90% of Plankton, which formed the basis of the food web of marine life.
• Ultimately, this would kill off the large marine reptiles and ammonites that used to dominate the seas.

A Hostile New World#

The biosphere the survivors now find themselves in is like an alien landscape. Ash, debris, and the burned remains of the formerly lush and blooming life cover the ground. The sky is dark, and it’s cold, and fresh food is scarce while fungi thrive. For months and years, the planet will be a hostile and deadly place. The sudden Global Winter will last for decades. At least 75% of all species on Earth will just vanish from existence.

The End of Continuity and the Rise of Survivors#

And so, as the day ends, the world is suddenly different. The continuity that went on for millions of years is no more. The era of the dinosaurs is over, just like that.

Eventually, from the ashes of the old world, survivors emerged:

• Birds, that are the direct descendants of the dinosaurs.
• Mammals, that would eventually become the dominant animals on the planet.

Without the asteroid, who knows what life on Earth would look like today? Without the sudden disruption of dinosaur continuity that completely changed the planet and all life on it, we might have never had the opportunity to become what we are today.

Humans and the Fragility of Continuity#

It’s not clear how long the human era will last. So far, modern humans have been around for 0.1% of the time the dinosaurs were. And in this short amount of time, we’ve achieved impressive feats, from making the world our own to reaching space and splitting the atom. Yet, our future and our long-term survival are not a given. If we’re not careful, it could end in an instant, like the age of the dinosaurs ended.

But in contrast to them, we know that our continuity is fragile, even if it doesn’t feel like it. We can be prepared and be vigilant and hopeful. If we’re lucky, our journey will go on for a long, long time.

A Note on Our Journey and Transparency#

Speaking of journeys, we want to address something in the spirit of transparency.

Evolution of the Channel#

Kazak has changed in the last 2 years. We’ve become more than a YouTube channel or Animation studio.

Introducing the Paper Shop#

And now, we also run a paper shop that sells hundreds of thousands of calendars, posters, and notebooks. That’s not a happy accident.

Our Roots in Paper#

Many of us have a background in graphic design. Paper products are “Our Roots”, and we actually started out creating posters, books, and print infographics.

Why We Love Paper#

We love that you can touch them, smell them, nerd about small details and printing techniques.

Building the Shop Step-by-Step#

Just like the channel, we started small and without great ambition. Step by step, we found the right printers and papers, learned about shipping, and expanded our shop.

Our Commitment to Quality and Mission#

We put a huge amount of research, love, and hours into it, because this is the only way we know how to do things. We don’t just want to make generic merch. We want to make things that fit our mission of making science exciting and creating beautiful things – things that persist and are made with high quality and love.

The Shop’s Importance: Funding and Independence#

Our shop gives us another outlet to do this, and as a nice side effect, has turned into our main source of income for everything we do on this channel. This also keeps us independent and our videos free for everyone.

What’s Next? Building on Success#

So we want to build further on that and create more things that last.

New Products: The Pocket Log#

We’ve just started a new notebook line called pocket log that we will expand on in the future. The first edition is a dinosaur themed collection that will hopefully serve a future paleontologist well.

Future Plans and Your Input#

There are loads of plans for sciency stuff: more journals and calendars and infographics. Let us know what you would like us to make for your kids, classrooms, and yourself.

A Heartfelt Thank You#

In the end, the things we do work because you like them and because you enable us to put thousands of hours into videos and hundreds of hours into posters and journals. Thank you so much for that.

Looking Ahead#

We’re looking forward to making fun sciencey stuff for you, no matter if it’s a video, a poster, or something else entirely. Thank you for watching.