system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How did species survive in the days just after the K-Pg Extinction event?

The K-Pg Extinction event (aka the Chicxulub impact, widely known as being the impact that killed the dinosaurs)  "devastated the global environment, mainly through a lingering impact winter which halted photosynthesis in plants and plankton" (Wikipedia). And yet numerous different species, the ancestors of all organisms today, somehow pulled through.

How, exactly, could anything survive this? How did plants survive without sunlight, or animals survive without anything to eat? I can understand scavenging for days and weeks on dead plant matter and decaying cadavers, but how was this sustainable for months and years? I just don't get what the means of survival were for long enough for the dust clouds to subside and photosynthesis to resume.

Thanks for any insight.
gpt
Here like with all things, that description is a vast oversimplification meant to make it easy to understand.

It wasn't that photosynthesis stopped altogether. The dust made sunlight very dim like a very cloudy day for years. Which made it hard for larger plants and things with high energy demands to survive, but smaller plants whom had evolved to live in the shadow of the larger plants could survive; especially after the larger plants died and stopped shading them and taking up the ground nutrients.

But because all the large plants died, so did the animals that needed the large plants for large quantities of food. As did the large carnivores that needed the large herbivores. However the small animals (some of the first mammals) were able to subsist even thrive on the smaller plants.