Let’s just take the Dinos for instance. They Originated, roughly, about 235 million years ago and went, mostly, extinct about 65 million years ago, that is about 170 million years. So what happens to the “every 27 million year extinction” theory then? They only went extinct once in that 170 million year period.
I have no explanation for that discrepancy. I just work here. Let’s ask an expert.
SC - get over here!!!
In prison they have the 95/5. 95% of the population want to get along and do the right thing. Not make waves. The other 5% just want to make trouble.
I love this place. I think I 'fit' right in. LOL
Oh, thanks, no, no, let me take care of it... ;’)
The reason for this is, there were periods punctuated by mass extinctions in that 170 million year stretch, with the K-T mass extinction being the worst of those. The P-T (Permian-Triassic) extinction was actually much worse, over 90 percent of species just went piff. IOW, there is no such problem.
My view remains that, when uniformitarians try to make catastrophe behave, it’s like when old people, well, you know...
An object the size of, say, one of the moons of Mars, would upon impact on the Earth probably sterilize the entire thing, leaving nada, possibly even at depth, where the extremophiles live. All the water on the surface (as well as all or most of the subterranean “seas”, water that has collected in gigantic cracks inside the Earth’s crust) would turn to vapor in a time frame from near-instantaneously to a few hours.
IOW, this would be something to avoid, if at all possible.
The P-T extinction involved one or more impacts (by “one or more”, think of the SL-9 comet fragments which rained down over a couple of weeks and scarred Jupiter’s face for months) of a mass that was perhaps twice or maybe three times that of the impactor at the K-T extinction. The K-T object may have been as large as ten miles across.
An object one mile across (give or take velocity and mass, but these would be quibbles) on impact would release more energy than all the Earth’s nukes if they were piled up and set off simulataneously.
An object two miles across (same quibbles) would be eight times that much (at least), and represents more energy than has been released by all human activity throughout history and prehistory, combined. Kind of a lot, really.