The environmental effects of the Chicxulub impact, the trigger of the mass extinction event at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, can be seen clearly in the geological record on time scales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. However, how this affected the marine biosphere in the decades and centuries after the strike is difficult to tell from proxy data because of their low temporal resolution. Brugger et al. modeled the immediate aftermath of sulfate aerosols, carbon dioxide, and dust caused by the impact, and found a short-lived algal bloom caused by upwelling of nutrients from the deep ocean and nutrient input from the impactor, a strong temperature decrease, and moderate surface ocean acidification. These results help to fill in a gap that proxies have left blank.
Geophys. Res. Lett. 10.1029/2020GL092260 (2021).