The asteroid that annihilated the dinosaurs and “reset the clock” for life on Earth could not have done the job without first liquefying the planet’s surface, a new study found.

Lead researcher and geophysicist Sean Gulick spoke to RT.

The scientific consensus has been for some time that about 66 million years ago, Earth changed forever.

But exactly how is still being learned, and new research from the University of Texas at Austin goes as far as to alter “clues into the origin of life on earth,” Sean Gulick, a research professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences’ Institute for Geophysics, told RT’s Manila Chan.

Not only was the sun blocked out by the earth’s atmosphere and 75 percent of all life extinguished following an asteroid collision, but the earth’s surface at the site of the impact “was vaporized.”

“And then a bit below that was ejected,” Gulick said. “But the material below that then started behaving, we think, much like a slow-moving fluid.”

“We’re learning something fundamental about the relationship between impacts and subsurface life,” Gulick said, adding, “We already know that there’s more biomass on the earth today in the crust than there is on the surface.”

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