Fossil trove shows life's fast recovery after big extinction

More than three-quarters of species on Earth died out. But life came back, and land mammals began to expand from being small creatures into the wide array of forms we see today—including us.

So the new find taps into "the origin of the modern world," said Tyler Lyson, an author of a paper reporting the fossil finds Thursday in the journal Science. The fossils were recovered from an area of steep bluffs covering about 10 square miles (17 square kilometers) near Colorado Springs, starting three years ago.

Scientists have previously found little evidence about what happened in the aftermath of the meteorite crash, especially on land, said Jin Meng of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The new work, he said in an email, appears to provide "the best record on Earth to date."

The study reports on hundreds of mammal fossils representing 16 species and more than 6,000 plant fossils. Researchers also analyzed thousands of pollen grains to see what plants were alive at various times. Analysis of leaves indicated several warming periods during the period.

An essay by J. E. Enever, Giant Meteor Impact, first published in Analog, March 1966 hits most of the high points.

He couldn't quite make the step to part of the atmosphere being blown into space. The only referent he had was hydrogen bomb tests where the fireball would be larger than the depth of the atmosphere, and the fireball would be described as if it hit the stratosphere and was forced to "squat" on the surface of the Earth, (apparently the concept of the firmament being a solid was strong!).

Since Analog is mostly a science fiction magazine, Enever's work was largely ignored as a flight of fantasy. Even when Luis and Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit demonstrated that a major impact event coincided with the death of the dinosaurs.

I came across a mention, which I can't recall clearly enough to track down that the dinosaurs with their long, relatively narrow trachea were effectively turbocharged by the higher oxygen content of the atmosphere, but conflicting information that a higher percentage of oxygen in the air would lead to massive forest fires.

AFAIK, I'm the first to recognize that the only way to have more oxygen in every lung full of air without having such a high percentage that a single lightning bolt set everything ablaze was to have a denser atmosphere. That a goodly fraction of the Earth's atmosphere is just plain gone seems to be a blind spot. And why not? It's a very terrifying concept!

An animation on a recent NatGeo special on the Chicxulube impact showed the sea water gently flowing back into the crater without so much a a whisper of steam! Hello???

Oh, did I happen to mention that a Chicxulub-sized event rings the planet like a bell?

World wide any fault that is near its critical strain is apt to let loose, as is any volcano near its eruption threshold (think Mt. St. Helens, an eruption triggered by a landslide).

Worse, doctors and coroners have a term, 'coup contercoup', that means damage to the opposite side of the brain from where the skull was struck.

Imagine you are standing on the spot exactly on the opposite side from the strike. The shock waves race around the globe and come together (focus, if you will) right under your feet!

On a lower gravity bodies such as the moon, big impacts have delivered sufficient coup countercoup force to jet material off into space.

I don’t doubt that nearby magma would be squirted up through the resulting shattered bedrock. I think this is how the Deccan Traps formed. They weren't quite geographically exactly opposite Chicxulub, but exact opposite assumes perfectly uniform density and a straight-on strike.

All in all a BAD day...

Yep, I'm hip. We tend to think of the crust as ridged like an egg shell when it would be more like flicking a water balloon. This is my own argument with the narrative that the moon can influence the mass of the oceans but not influence the crust. I think this is wrong, if the moon can have enough influence to create a fluctuating earth/moon mass Barycenter making us dance a jig, it absolutely has to have some influence on the crust also. Especially during solar system planetary alignment events in conjunction with the Barycenter cycle. This another of those cases where we limit the number of influence possibilities in our perspective. We acknowledge the rotation of the earth, the axis wobble, and the orbit around the sun. But there is more, We have planetary center of mass Barycenters influencing each other and the sun adding another movement influence. And the fact that as part of the solar system we are also corkscrewing through the galaxy on top of these basic movements.

I suppose it makes us feel safer and more confident if we do not add all these together and ignore some, But truth is it is far more complicated and we truly are an accident waiting to happen at any moment. lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGBANgbRkws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU

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