Note: this topic is from 05/11/2015. Adding to the list, not pinging.
Posted on 05/11/2015 1:22:51 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
I see no reason why rejecting the antipodal theory means there was not an effect in India from the Yucatan event. That would only seem valid if the rock came straight at the earth. What if it hit at a moderate angle? Also, in the past several centuries I have detected a pattern of large earthquakes and major volcanic events coming around the same time.
I don’t see why extinction could not be somewhat gradual. For example, a number of us here think that Firestone et al. are right about a Northern Hemisphere boloid strike(s) around 13,000 years ago. This also coincides with the death of many of our mega fauna. However, it is also known that Mammoths and some others were still around several thousand years later, if not here, then in Europe and Siberia. I think that many dinosaurs were destroyed by the immediate impact devastation. I think the direct burns of the fiery radiation killed many. This even probably also destroyed the ozone layer so that skin cancer killed many survivors. I believe this is why small jungle/forest living mammals survived, as did snakes, turtles, crocodiles, and other creatures that were not running around in sunny open spaces. Nevertheless there were probably some dinosaurs protected by being asleep in a forest/jungle, on the safe side of a hill or cliff, or in a canyon that did survive for a time, but as the climate continued to stay bad for a long time gradually all died out.
Seems to me that a large asteroid strike would cause a shock wave in the mantle to radiate outwards from point of impact and refocus roughly at a point on the far side of the globe and maybe crack the crust open.
Extinction is instantaneous — a species is alive, alive, alive, alive, then one half of the last mating pair dies off, still alive, alive, then boom, last one dies, and the species is instantly extinct.
For extinction to be gradual presupposes that the biome has psychic powers and knows where this is heading. It’s an outgrowth of Lamarckian nonsense like “selection pressure”.
The problem remains the foundation of the claim, which is, an impact happens, and has no effect on anything, it’s just a huge coincidence. Now that the rapidity of the complete killing of whole taxa can no longer be denied (it was for 20+ years), well, gosh, maybe the impact caused these volcanoes to go off...
No, those large impacts are enough by themselves.
I’d also point out that volcanic activity has local effects, but there is no worldwide trace of massive volcanic activity in the paleontological boundary layers. None. Anywhere. There was of course an attempt to attribute the iridium to volcanic activity, but that was shown to be (and previously known to be) nonsense. The Earth doesn’t have enough iridium in its depths to produce a spike like that.
I was thinking that an asteroid hit could cause the huge lava flows like the Deccan or Columbia on the opposite side of the globe from impact.
I know when I was a kid and the IGY provided traction for the plate tectonics theory that it had taken a couple of generations from Wegener to be accepted. Had to get the old professors and their students out of the way I reckon.
The Alvarez guys had quite a battle too, didn’t they?
BTW, I have the Pierce translation of The Oera Linda Book and it puts the sinking of Aldland at 2193 BC.
There are effects in the immediate area. Stuff up close disintegrates; stuff further out is destroyed by the shock wave; anything flammable catches fire from the flash at some distance, and fires can spread. The heat energy from the impact exceeds that of all the fires, and raises the temperature of the entire atmosphere by more than a little bit.
An object about a mile in diameter arrives with more energy than all the world’s nuclear weapons if they were put one pile and set off simultaneously.
The disintegrated material from the impactor and from what becomes the crater, plus assorted soot and whatnot, goes up with the fireball and is propagated out by the shock wave, spreading out supersonically and covering the surface of the Earth in about 90 minutes. No sunlight reaches the surface for months or years. The hydrologic cycle slows to near zero and water that doesn’t freeze runs down into the oceans, which are salty. Larger critters die of thirst in a few days, or hunger in a bit longer time, unless they’ve already died of shock. All plants go dormant or die off. Species unable to survive the years of darkness don’t, but may come back from seed in the soil — assuming the seed isn’t scavenged by the small surviving critters which burrow, such as a number of mammal species still do.
An object two miles in diameter has approximately eight times the volume and eight times the mass, and therefore eight times the energy, because it’s twice the size in three dimensions.
The Chicxulub object is estimated to have been about six miles across — and that’s 216 times greater than a one mile object (6 x 6 x 6). Kind of a lot really.
Now you can see why basically unattested “supereruptions” have been posited and how their energy gets more and more supersized as the years go on.
A single large impact from space, by a mile-wide object, releases the energy of more than the 17,000 nuclear warheads (that’s the number still in existence), and those aren’t the 20 kiloton bombs of WWII, they’re all in excess of 1.4 megatons. And Chicxulub was over 200 times bigger than that.
:’) Wegener’s drift had no evidence in its favor, other than the initial inspiration — that the west coast of Africa looks the concave fit to the east coast of South America. The remanent magnetic fields in rocks at some of the plate boundaries show switches at irregular intervals that were believed to be dateable analogous to the growth rings in trees.
The IGY (which lasted much more than a year, once they got going they couldn’t stop, it transformed the sciences) also turned up the Eltanic impact crater in the southern Pacific, even left the usual iridium traces in the sediment. Eventually beech tree fossils were found in Antarctica, and are dated to less than three million years — meaning that the Antarctic had a climate not dissimilar to what we have here in Michigan, and it stopped sometime in the past few million years.
Same questions I’ve had.
And no answers.
I see what our problem is. You are viewing extinction as an event, while I am viewing it is a dynamic process. For example, we once had millions of passenger pigeons. Then we were down to a few individuals, but apparently they needed the excitement of masses to stir their reproductive hormones, so that once they fell below a critical number, they were essentially extinct even though some were still alive. So for them there was an extinction process, not a single extinction event. For the same reason I believe that the end of the dinosaurs was a process rather than a single event, but the end result was all dinosaurs died and relatively quickly as goes geologic time.
Tell me more about this Book and 2193 BC. I have read of other evidence of severe living conditions either spreading over or 150 years apart prior to 2000 BC. The Ipuwer papyrus at the Lyden Museum describes the terrible conditions of the 1st Intermediate Period in Egypt. Sunken Civ also brought to our attention the finding of a mile wide crater about 2000 BC in the dried up Iraq Marshes.
Extinction comes from the end of the life of the last of a species, it’s not a “process”. Species in human times can be on a manmade endangered list, but they aren’t extinct.
The dinos were completely wiped out. While there are fossils spread out over 135 million years or so, there are none after the K-T boundary. So they didn’t dwindle down for other reasons, then there was coincidentally an impact that had nothing to do with it. Nor were they in decline for millions of years (another foolish idea) and were finally tipped into the dustbin by a sudden uptick in volcanic eruptions.
Note: this topic is from 05/11/2015. Adding to the list, not pinging.
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