刘文勇黄金阅读70版本：陨石撞击与恐龙的灭绝.docxVIP

智课网TOEFL备考资料 刘文勇黄金阅读70版本：陨石撞击和恐龙的灭绝 摘要： 最新版《刘文勇黄金阅读7.0版本》高清PDF格式支持免费下载，下面是小编整理的刘文勇黄金阅读：Meteorite Impact and Dinosaur Extinction 陨石撞击和恐龙的灭绝，希望对大家备考托福阅读有所帮助。  刘文勇黄金阅读7.0版本:Meteorite Impact and Dinosaur Extinction  There is increasing evidence that the impacts of meteorites have had important effects on Earth, particularly in the field of biological evolution. Such impacts continue to pose a natural hazard to life on Earth. Twice in the twentieth century, large meteorite objects are known to have collided with Earth.  If an impact is large enough, it can disturb the environment of the entire Earth and cause an ecological catastrophe. The best-documented such impact took place 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period of geological history. This break in Earths history is marked by a mass extinction, when as many as half the species on the planet became extinct. While there are a dozen or more mass extinctions in the geological record, the Cretaceous mass extinction has always intrigued paleontologists because it marks the end of the age of the dinosaurs. For tens of millions of years, those great creatures had flourished. Then, suddenly, they disappeared. The body that impacted Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period was a meteorite with a mass of more than a trillion tons and a diameter of at least 10 kilometers. Scientists first identified this impact in 1980 from the worldwide layer of sediment deposited from the dust cloud that enveloped the planet after the impact. This sediment layer is enriched in the rare metal iridium and other elements that are relatively abundant in a meteorite but very rare in the crust of Earth. Even diluted by the terrestrial material excavated from the crater, this component of meteorites is easily identified. By 1990 geologists had located the impact site itself in the Yucat region of Mexico. The crater, now deeply buried in sediment, was originally about 200 kilometers in diameter.