I believe there was more energy released by the meteor impact than could be released by all our current nuclear stockpiles.
Besides, 65 million years later, look how far we’ve come from the impact.
Cite?
Exactly. 65 million years later. After the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, the first modern mammals did not emerge until the Eocene, which began 37.2 million years ago. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_timescale) A gap of almost 30 million years. Extinction-level events have lasting impact.
Unable to find at present.
We’ll just have to differ on what we consider to be significant time scales. Once mankind is wiped out, I think anything less than 250 million years is pretty much small-time.
Estimates of the total energy released by the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact seem to range from 100 teratons to 300 teratons. (A teraton is a million megatons.)
Of course, a single impact like that is probably less efficient at mass killing than a larger number of more evenly distributed smaller explosions. Without taking radiation effects into consideration, or any other differences between nuclear or thermonuclear explosions and extraterrestrial impacts, if you simultaneously detonated one relatively modest 20-kiloton nuclear bomb over every square mile of Earth’s surface, you would release the energy equivalent to the explosion of “only” about 4 teratons of TNT, a fraction of the energy of the K-T impact, but I imagine you would do considerably more destruction to this planet’s biosphere. (Not that I am saying this scenario is remotely within the human race’s capabilities; it would require nearly 200 million nuclear weapons; just that making comparisons between different catastrophic events is more than a matter of adding up the megatons and teratons.)
I believe you are remembering incorrectly. The humans of that future, as well as the few remaining dogs, are quite capable of breathing the heavily poluted atmosphere. In fact, they are unable to breathe the much cleaner air of our time and must wear filter helmets during time travel. The many animals which have been retrieved from the past and placed in a zoo, do need special enclosures and the atmosphere is toxic to them.
You’re right, my bad.
And what studies would those be?