Chicxulub

[Nidalap]

Does anyone know by how much the Chicxulub changed the trajectory of earth around the sun?

Reason I ask, if such an impact could significantly alter the trajectory of Earth causing it to have magma in its core to annually rise and fall like the moon's daily effects on the oceans, then the volcanic activity spike could have occurred due to the change in trajectory and would have been a contributing factor to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

[Atmos (Colin)]

I personally don't think that it would have had any effect at all. As asteroids go it was a reasonable size but compared to the mass of the Earth, be like swatting a gnat.

[csb (Craig)]

I had to research for what is Chicxulub - it's a huge 180km impact crater caused by an estimated 10km diameter meteor along the Mexican coastline. Very interesting reading with great physical evidence.

So scientists do think this collision coincided with the dinosaur mass extinction event. But wouldn't that be more likely due to the more immediate effect of the meteor impact, especially material thrown into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and changing the climate. This would also affect the foodchain.

[AussieTrooper (Ben)]

I doubt it. To get a sense of scale, throw a grain of sand at a boulder several metres across. See how much the boulder moves. Chicxculub wasn’t the biggest of the impacts by a long shot either. It is just the most recent of the major impacts.

[OICURMT]

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/Chicxulub.html

click on the pdf link for the full article.

<EDIT: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/effects.pdf >