Posted on 02/24/2022 11:45:38 PM PST by LibWhacker
We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the plants and animals on Earth were wiped out, including all the land-roaming dinosaurs. But here’s a new detail about that event: Even though we can’t pinpoint exactly what year this disaster took place, we now know it happened during the springtime.
Most scientists agree the disaster was an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated.
While previous studies looking at the timing of this event have focused on millennial timescales, a new study from Melanie During and colleagues from the University of Sweden focused on pinpointing seasonal information of fossilized fish found in a site in North Dakota, that perished as a result of the devastating impact.
The devastation created layer of ash sandwiched between layers of rock, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, formerly known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary, which is found across the world in the geologic record. It includes a layer of iridium, an element common in asteroids but rare on Earth. It was this ‘iridium anomaly’ that first revealed the extinction event as an asteroid strike to geologists more than three decades ago.
Artistic reconstruction by Joschua Knüppe of the Seiche wave surging into the Tanis river, bringing in fishes and everything in its path (dinosaurs, trees) while impact spherules rain down from the sky. Some dinosaurs are still trying to get away but we know they will not get far. Ants try to get back into their nest as the just blooming dianthus in the foreground are already being impacted by the impact spherules. Credit: Joschua Knüppe
Well-preserved fossil bones of filter-feeding sturgeons and paddlefishes found in the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota had impact debris lodged in their gills, but nowhere further down the digestive system, suggesting an almost-instantaneous death occurred when an impact-triggered seiche –continental water shaken by the impact — caused a sudden upriver surge.
The researchers found distinct growth patterns in the fossils that provided record of seasonal change, of when the fish had reproduced and had developing offspring. In the northern hemisphere, this would have been in the spring.
“We postulate that the timing of the Chicxulub impact in boreal spring and austral autumn was a major influence on selective biotic survival across the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary,” the authors wrote in their paper, published in Nature.
The timing of the collision, at least for the Northern Hemisphere, would have come at a particularly sensitive stage in the biological life cycles of many plants and animals.
“I think spring puts a large group of the late Cretaceous biota (animal and plant life) in a very vulnerable spot because they were out and about looking for food, tending to offspring and trying to build up resources after the harsh winter,” Melanie During said at a news briefing.
By contrast, the researchers said that ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere, where it was fall when the asteroid collided with Earth, appear to have bounced back nearly twice as fast as those in the Northern Hemisphere.
Even though these fossils were found 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) away from the impact crater, the details of the dig show the large fish – which are up to a meter (3 feet) long — died dramatically shortly after the asteroid strike. They were buried alive by sediment displaced as a massive body of water unleashed by the asteroid strike moved upstream.
Impact spherules — small bits of molten rock ejected from the crater went high into the atmosphere or even to space where they crystallized into a glass-like material — were found lodged in the fishes’ gills.
“These impact spherules got ejected into space, …and rained back down on Earth,” During said. “This deposit literally looks like a car crash frozen in place. It looks like the most violent thing I have ever seen, preserved in pristine condition.”
This new study coincides with previous studies from as early as 1991 which showed fossils in the same condition, which suggested is happened in June, along with another study from December of 2021, which also concluded the extinction event happened in spring.
Beware The Ides Of March
According to this https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15269-...
"Chicxulub crater was formed by a steeply-inclined (45–60° to horizontal) impact from the northeast."So not from the direction of the sun! That's the first time I've heard that, so thanks.
The Center for Scientific Creation sounds very similar to another that I am very familiar with, Institute for Creation Research which was founded by Dr. Henry Morris. https://www.icr.org/
I have read almost all of Dr. Morris’ books and highly recommend them.
Springtime in the Northern hemisphere. If you had read the entire article, you would know that the fossils examined were from North Dakota.
I don’t bother reading fake science.
You must have not read my explanation in #29 Noah’s flood was God unleashing the tremendous stores of water both in the atmosphere and underground, all over the world at once. The force was so great that it caused great trauma to the earth. Fish in shallow water, rivers, streams, lakes would have been tossed around, even out of the water in some places, in this upheaval. It was not a gentle rain and slow filling of water. The forces were mighty and disastrous.
The telling calculation is the mass of earth divided by the mass of Mt Everest. Earth is about 30 thousand trillion times heavier than the asteroid was. The elephant is not even close to being that much heavier than the gnat!
Your post wasn’t an explanation, it was fiction.
That depends on whether or not you believe in the God of the Bible and his “Word” (Scripture). I guess, my FRiend, we will just have to agree to disagree. 🙂
"...“We find overwhelming support for a long-term decline across all dinosaurs and within all three dinosaurian subclades, where speciation rate slowed down through time and was ultimately exceeded by extinction rate tens of millions of years before the K-Pg boundary,” the scientists said....
I love Paris in the Springtime....
Yep, made me think about the time some of us were standing by the trucks on a job site back in the 90’s . It’s wad a bluebird day not a cloud in the sky and the air was clean so clean that the shadows were succinct and dark so as to be noticeable like on the moon they say.
As we were standing around discussing business suddenly the sun blinked, all of us noticed it and looked up for a bird a plane or Superman but saw nothing.
Fortunately for us that day we did not stay in the shade, regards and that’s a true story.
Right, boreal spring and austral autumn... covered in the article.
Hot fudge Sunday came on a Tuesday?🤔
Heh
Thanks for posting this-it is cool to get home and read some real science based on REAL research in the natural world after being captive to a Covidian-vaxx Karen customer blabbing the faux science du jour for hours...
We do live on a globe.
So spring time one place is fall somewhere else and the land masses tend to shuffle, rise and fall.
But what happened to the turtle?
It was Spring in the Northern hemisphere, Autumn in the southern hemisphere-the article refers to a fossil site in North Dakota...
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