{"id":1410,"date":"2026-07-17T23:12:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T23:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1410"},"modified":"2026-07-17T23:12:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T23:12:36","slug":"just-ask-the-dinosaurs-how-bad-air-quality-can-get","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1410","title":{"rendered":"Just Ask the Dinosaurs How Bad Air Quality Can Get"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The air quality this week is bad. Smoke from Canadian wildfires has turned the sky orange in Philadelphia. It has veiled the Statue of Liberty in Manhattan. In Detroit, which has dealt with some of the worst conditions in the country, the smoke has almost entirely blurred the city\u2019s skyline. The eastern United States isn\u2019t exactly accustomed to smoke days, which can prompt someone like me, from the wildfire-prone West, to brag about how they\u2019ve seen far worse. But those smoke days are nothing compared with the ones 66 million years ago. If you want to talk about bad air quality, ask the dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

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The asteroid that spelled the beginning of their end struck the Earth at about 40,000 miles an hour, blasting a 112-mile-wide crater into Mexico\u2019s Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula. The explosion was so big that it punched a hole into the atmosphere, bringing \u201couter space down to the surface of the Earth,\u201d Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told me. The impact flung trillions of tons of debris into the sky, and much of it headed right into that yawning atmosphere and into Earth\u2019s orbit. As the planet continued to rotate, \u201cyou basically got a global cloud of dust and debris that blocked sunlight from hitting the ground,\u201d Johnson said. And it blocked virtually all of the sunlight\u2014plunging the world into solar-eclipse-level darkness. Some hot debris fell back down from the atmosphere, and within minutes, wildfires were spreading. Enormous conflagrations combusted \u201call the biomass on the planet, not just some forests in Canada,\u201d Johnson said\u2014and with debris blocking the sun, those wildfires were \u201cburning in a dark world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the worldwide fires, dinosaurs would have been trapped in a level of smoke far more intense than the kind of downwind exposure that the U.S. experienced this week, Brian Toon, a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me. Unfortunately\u2014or maybe fortunately for them\u2014many dinosaurs were not alive to experience this global-wildfire-pitch-black hellscape. The asteroid-impact event was a \u201cmassive, atomic-blast-scale thing, like 1 billion Hiroshimas of energy released,\u201d Johnson said. The dinosaurs within about 1,000 miles of the impact site died \u201cjust by being exploded, basically,\u201d he said\u2014and given the magnitude of the blast, \u201cif you were a human-sized animal standing anywhere on the planet at the surface, your survival of the first week is pretty unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other creatures perished during the ensuing climate mayhem. Within a week, maybe for months, the brightest day would have looked more like a moonlit night, Ken MacLeod, a geology professor at the University of Missouri, told me. The air wasn\u2019t just smoky, he said; it was loaded with dust and gases. The gloom lasted for about two years, as particulates from the asteroid impact remained in the atmosphere and soot from wildfires added to them. The next couple of decades were \u201cvery low light, very difficult for photosynthesis to occur,\u201d which led herbivores to starve, Brian Huber, a research geologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told me.<\/p>\n

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At what point would the atmosphere of this dark, foreign planet have settled into something like the haze hanging over Detroit today? No one was totally sure: \u201cI would bet years, decades after,\u201d Huber said. Johnson estimated that it would have been about a couple of years after impact; curators at New York City\u2019s American Museum of Natural History found that 40 percent of sunlight was still blocked two years after the asteroid event, the museum told me. Although most soot and dust particles went away within a few years, sulfate aerosols continued to create \u201ca global, orange-brown smog,\u201d the dinosaur-extinction exhibit notes. According to the museum, it was only about four years after the asteroid arrived that full sunlight reappeared. The era in which the dinosaurs perished would be unrecognizable to a modern person. Compared with that, the air pollution Americans are facing right now, Huber said, \u201cain\u2019t nothin\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists know all of this in part because the sheer amount of charcoal and soot\u2014millions and millions of tons of it\u2014that fell to the ground left traces that are still detectable today. The asteroid itself also left a thin layer of debris made of meteorite and ancient parts of what we now call Mexico. You can touch it in Trinidad Lake State Park, in southern Colorado, Toon said\u2014evidence from a time in this planet\u2019s history when things looked pretty much as apocalyptic as one could imagine.<\/p>\n

So, yes, the smoke this week is bad. The outdoor air quality is poor, and people should take precautions to limit the amount of it they\u2019re breathing. And yet, there is something to be grateful for each day. And today, it is that we are not dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

Read more Ukraine\u2019s Dr. Strangelove<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If an orange sky seems apocalyptic, imagine planet-wide fires against a black sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-planet"],"yoast_head":"\nJust Ask the Dinosaurs How Bad Air Quality Can Get - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1410\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just Ask the Dinosaurs How Bad Air Quality Can Get - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If an orange sky seems apocalyptic, imagine planet-wide fires against a black sky.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1410\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-17T23:12:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Just Ask the Dinosaurs How Bad Air Quality Can Get\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-17T23:12:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410\"},\"wordCount\":843,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/24dbd5de0d159cb6b67e3e0eb97e743a.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Planet\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1410\",\"name\":\"Just Ask the Dinosaurs How Bad Air Quality Can Get - 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