Lava layers
Posted on 05/11/2015 1:22:51 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The asteroid that slammed into the ocean off Mexico 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs probably rang the Earth like a bell, triggering volcanic eruptions around the globe that may have contributed to the devastation, according to a team of University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists.
Specifically, the researchers argue that the impact likely triggered most of the immense eruptions of lava in India known as the Deccan Traps, explaining the "uncomfortably close" coincidence between the Deccan Traps eruptions and the impact, which has always cast doubt on the theory that the asteroid was the sole cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction...
He stresses that his proposal differs from an earlier hypothesis that the energy of the impact was focused around Earth to a spot directly opposite, or antipodal, to the impact, triggering the eruption of the Deccan Traps. The "antipodal focusing" theory died when the impact crater, called Chicxulub, was found off the Yucatn coast of Mexico, which is about 5,000 kilometers from the antipode of the Deccan Traps.
Richards proposed in 1989 that plumes of hot rock, called "plume heads," rise through Earth's mantle every 20-30 million years and generate huge lava flows, called flood basalts, like the Deccan Traps. It struck him as more than coincidence that the last four of the six known mass extinctions of life occurred at the same time as one of these massive eruptions.
(Excerpt) Read more at astrobiology.com ...
Lava layers
“Magma.”
(yawn) Same old same old, but enough of a move that it may actually level the deadwood toward the inevitable conclusion that the dinos went extinct because of a huge impact of a space rock. Then the deadwood will die off, and this ridiculous volcanic crap can die off with them. BTW, this impact triggering eruptions idea was floated back when (25-30 years ago) and was rejected by the uniformitarians, because they couldn't have so much as a hint that a short-lived event would have that much, uh, impact.
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Magma come loudly.............
Part of the theory also had the Deccan traps (the INdain subcontinent) had moved between its present position and the time of the impact.
LOL!
Sounds right, that antipodal idea was rejected, in part, because they aren’t exactly opposite.
Secret Volcano Lair.
Has anyone verified this with bill nye?
;’)
Magma P.I. (planetary impact)
He's our most important scientician.
Yes. But only because Dick Cheney AIMED the asteroid at the dinosaurs...
Seems a reasonable theory to me that a big impact would set off volcanic eruptions—especially when you hear the geologists talk about an earth quake in one part of the globe tends to ring the crust like a bell and thereby set off earthquakes in other parts of crustal plates.
It wasn’t clear to me. Were you guys arguing that impacts and eruptions were discreet events or that its reasonable that there might be a cause and effect in the case of the big impacts.
"Tons and tons of molten smegma."
The point is, the “gradual extinction” idea (which is inherently ridiculous) got pantsed by the emergence of the Alvarez model; that model was based on actual evidence — the iridium spike in the narrow band between two paleontological layers — and the actual impact site didn’t need to be found. Oddly, the impact crater was identified in 1960, long before there *was* an Alvarez model.
Anyway, the gradualists rejected the idea outright — I’ve got a book I picked off a remainder table that purported to prove that the sudden extinction (the only kind that there is, logically, btw) was impossible, and that the impact model in particular was impossible.
The volcano “rock people” wanted in on the act, their field having been given swirlies by the Apollo landings — the lunar landscape is completely of impact origin. One of these guys, nearing the end of his career, fought tooth and nail against the Alvarez model, published papers which were shown to be not up to rigorous academic standards, and was shown the door. It seems not unlikely that other less senior academics at his employer were not all broken up about his sudden retirement. Anyway, he actually started a website to peddle his views, and on there claimed that Luis Alvarez had threatened him, and led to his nervous breakdown and early retirement.
There’s been a substantial contraction of the length of time the Deccan Traps are said to have been erupting; the idea is, in the past, millions of years of eruptions had the usual influence, meaning, local effects, slow continual accumulation of strata, no worldwide issues. In response to the slam-bang Great Dying that killed the dinosauria within days, weeks, or months, the length of time for the Deccan Traps’ eruptions had to be shrunk, which allowed amplification of their impact on worldwide climate, flora, and fauna, and restoration of a nice clean Darwinian uniformitarian gradual extinction.
Moving backwards I’m still wondering how our Earthy shows evidence of dinosauria (I like that word) tracks chasing or following human like tracks. Truly a difficult and demanding area of study that only seems to be getting harder.
It doesn’t. There are zero human tracks with dinosaur tracks.
Sobering.
Regrettably, the more I read of the internals of academia, the less respect I have for all of its fields.
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