article_snippet.sent: UK researchers found the heat near the impact site in Mexico was not intense enough to ignite plant material.
article_snippet.sent: A heat pulse lasted less than a minute, too short to set plants alight .
article_snippet.sent: A team of researchers has found that heat near the impact site in Mexico would not have been sufficient to ignite plants.
article_snippet.sent: A team of researchers has found that heat near the impact site would not have been sufficient to ignite plants.
article_snippet.sent: Further away from the impact site in Mexico (shown), in places like New Zealand, the heat could have lasted up to seven minutes and caused some localised fires.
article_snippet.sent: A heat pulse in the surrounding the area lasted for less than a minute followed the asteroid impact.
article_snippet.sent: While this was too short to ignite live plant material nearby, the effects of the asteroid impact further away could have been sufficient to set some material alight.
article_snippet.sent: The researchers said as far away as New Zealand, the heat would have been less intense but longer lasting, heating the ground for seven minutes - enough to ignite live plant matter.
article_snippet.sent: By combining computer simulations of the impact with methods from engineering we have been able to recreate the enormous heat of the impact in the laboratory,' said Dr Claire Belcher from the Earth System Science group in Geography at the University of Exeter. '
article_snippet.sent: This has shown us that the heat was more likely to severely affect ecosystems a long distance away, such that forests in New Zealand would have had more chance of suffering major wildfires than forests in North America that were close to the impact. '
article_snippet.sent: Pictured is the fire propagation apparatus recreating the impact induced thermal pulse at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary.