Quite the opposite, it's the same old tired Geologist and Astronomers who like playing with their computer models and taking trips to Cancun and being the darlings of the media who prop up what should have been a long dead hypothesis.
The impact hypothesis is easily falsified and debunked
Here's 10 reasons why the impact hypothesis fails right off the bat
1) Southern Hemisphere species were equally devastated as the Northern Hemisphere ones. This makes absolutely no sense. An asteroid hitting in the Northern Hemisphere should cause more devastation in the Northern Hemisphere.
2) Freshwater Species including amphibians (100% survival rate) did quite well. One only has to come to upstate NY to see the damage done to freshwater species by acid rain, Some lakes are completely dead. If the relatively tiny amount of acid rain put out by Midwestern plants can cause all that damage then the massive amounts of acid rain produced by a global nuclear winter would have had devastating effects all all freshwater species. That is not what we see.
3) Plankton
a) Diatoms. The K-T event did not much affect the diatoms. Harwood (1988), based on studies from Seymour Island, eastern Antarctic Peninsula, the first to record siliceous microfossil assemblages across a K-T boundary sequence, notes that diatom survivorship across the K-T boundary was above 90 percent. Resting spores increase from 7 percent below to 35 percent across the K-T boundary.
b) Dinoflagellates. Dinoflagellates also were little affected by the K-T event (Bujak and Williams, 1979). Brinkhuis and Zachariasse (1988) record no accelerated rates of extinction across the K-T boundary in Tunisia. Nor does Hultberg (1986) in Scandinavia. Danish dinoflagellates responded more by appearance of new species than by extinctions (Hansen, 1977), as did Seymour Island assemblages (Askin, 1988).
c) Yes other plankton did suffer massive extinctions but it wasn't because of the Asteroid or K-T event.
Marine calcareous microplankton, the coccolithophorids and planktonic foraminifera, were hit hardest of all by the K-T event. Thierstein (1981) proposes that the coccolithophorids extinctions were the most severe plankton extinction event in geologic history; via a "deconvolution" process, Thierstein (1981, 1982) reduced a Cretaceous-Tertiary "transition," in which Cretaceous assemblages were replaced by "new" Tertiary taxa, to an instantaneous catastrophe. Perch-Nielsen et al. (1982) note that the "catastrophic event"at the K-T boundary did not result in geologically instant extinction of the calcareous nannoplankton, and that most Cretaceous species survived the event. At DSDP Site 524, a sample above the K-T boundary contains 90 percent Cretaceous species. Isotopic analyses indicated that the Cretaceous species were not reworked specimens, but represented survivors of the K-T event that continued to reproduce in the earliest Tertiary oceans. The relict species became extinct some tens of thousands of years after K-T boundary time, probably via environmental stresses.
d) Antia and Cheng's (1970) work on survival times of phytoplankton species in complete darkness indicate that 1 month of complete blackout would produce 13 percent extinction, 3 months 68 percent extinction , and 6 months 81 percent. Thus, the 6 month to 1 year global blackout predicted by Wolbach et al. (1985) would have obliterated diatoms, dinoflagellate, and coccolithophorids precisely at the K-T boundary. A blackout event is not reflected in the algal record.
So please tell me how did photoplankton who depend on sunlight for their very exsistance not only not die out but actually thrive during a global blackout??
e) Another interesting thing about plankton, Microfossils were actually found in the Chicxulub crater itself!!! and even though they are essentially at "Ground Zero" they show no ill effects.
4) Reptiles would have suffered greatly if an Asteroid struck however they seem to have cruised through the K-T with no problems.
a) Turtles "The Hell Creek and Tullock formations contain many turtles, and span the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Over 3000 specimens were counted on a modified minimum number basis from 510 localities. At least 15 of about 19 Cretaceous genera and subgenera survive into the Paleocene. The magnitude of the change in diversity is less than or comparable to examples within the Tertiary. These data do not support a unique comprehensive extinction at the end of the Cretaceous as postulated on the basis of Iridiurn concentrations."
My link is gone but the quote is from: Hutchison, JH. H., and J. D. Archibald. 1986. Diversity of turtles across the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary in northeastern Montana. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 55:1-22.
b) The four crocidilian families survived seemingly unaffected through the K-T boundary.
Most notable is the American Alligator whose ancestors were living at the time of Cretaceous right at ground zero
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This is the skull of an extinct animal closely related to living crocodylians (U.S. National Museum 22039). It comes from the middle Cretaceous (roughly 100 million years ago) of central Texas. It shows the occlusal pattern seen in the common ancestor of alligators and crocodiles. So they were there! |
Even forgetting about the implausibility of Alligators who are very cold sensitive surviving a nuclear winter, How did they survive the blast and the follow up tsunami an Asteroid would have caused?
5) Tropical Honeybees also would have been wiped out immediately under the impact scenario. They survived unscathed.
6) Dinosaurs
a) Dinosaurs were living near the poles so they were capable of surviving cold temps, So if other animals could survive a global nuclear winter why couldn't they?
b) Dinosaurs were slowly going extinct before the K-T event and probably most of them were gone by it.
Sullivan (1987) For the 19 dinosaurian families (33 to 39 species) existing in the last 20 million years of the Cretaceous, most disappeared before K-T boundary time, and eight at the K-T boundary. The eight families are represented by 12 species in the final 3 million year of the Cretaceous, and most of the species by only a few specimens (two to 10, average 5.7).
c) Few dino fossils are found in the K-T boundary. Fossilization maybe a rare process mostly due to scavengers scattering the bones. However if an Asteroid strike instantly wiped out the dinosaurs than there would have been too many dead bodies for even the scavengers to get them all, so their should be large amounts of fossils in the K-T boundary
d) Actually there is evidence that some dinosaurs made it into the Tertiary.
e) One group of Dinosaurs did make it and lives to this very day, We call them Birds.
7) The Thin Layer of Iridium:
That "Thin" layer of iridium as it is described represents 10,000-100,000 years of sediment. How on Earth could iridium (a heavy metal no less) stay up in the atmosphere that long? It would at most wash out within months if not weeks or days.
8) Iridium spikes aren't uncommon:
a) Notice the larger than the KT iridium spike way later in the Paleocene (on the upper right side)
Now, If a 10 mile wide Asteroid caused the IR Spike for the KT-Boundary. How many more time larger would an Asteroid have to be to cause that bigger spike later on? How come that one didn't cause mass extinctions?
b) There are multiple Iridium at some locations
For example, Lattengebirge, Bavarian Alps, has three iridium anomalies, below, at, and above, the K-T boundary (Graup and Spettel, 1989). The oldest anomaly antedates the K-T boundary by 14,000-9,000 years. To which of these anomalies might the Rocky Mountain (and other) "K-T boundary" iridium spike be isochronous, if any? The Brazos River, Texas, locality has two iridium spikes, one at the K-T boundary, and one below (Ganapathy et al., 1981). At Gubbio, Italy, both the iridium and shocked minerals do not occur as a sharp K-T spike; enrichment begins 2 m below the boundary and extends 2 m above it for a total of about 400,000 years (Crockett et al, 1988; Rocchia et al., 1989)
8) Volcanos can also produce Iridium spikes.
For example the 1783 Lakigigar eruption produced an 18-fold iridium enrichment in the ice cores of Greenland which is well within the range of the iridium spikes of the K-T event. So volcanic activity can produce iridium spikes and boy was there monstrous volcanic activity during the KT. The Deccan traps of India and Pakistan- (covering 500,000 sq. km and up to 2 km thick) , southern Brazil , western U.S, etc which was more than enough to produce the iridium spikes. Plus the volcanic activity unlike a one shot asteroid lasted a long time so it could have been laying down iridium over 10,000-100,000 years. Koeberl (1989) also reports iridium concentrations up to 7.5 ppb in volcanic dust bands in blue ice fields from Antarctica.
9) Iridium is missing from the Chicxulub crater itself!!!!!
How can an Asteroid or whatever (It's still not proven to be a meteor crater and it's looking like one less and less) that caused the Chicxulub crater produce a iridium spike around the world when it didn't contain iridium?
10) Arsenic, antimony, and selenium levels are very high in the K-T Boundary, These elements are rare in meteorites (but not in volcanoes).
None of these makes sense under the impact hypothesis
And speaking of "trying to head off their own intellectual extinction"
See the link I posted about how Iridium is missing from the Chicxulub crater itself!!!!!
Now the evidence this guy found clearly overwhelmingly debunks the Asteroid theory, yet this guy blatantly just dismisses it.
Quote right from the conclusion in the paper
"If we exclude the extremely implausible assumption that the K/T boundary is not related to the Chicxulub impact event",
Like Hey!!!, who says you can do that? You can't just exclude conclusions because you don't like it. That's piss poor science at it's worst.
Here's another example of Pro-Asteroid scientist playing tricks to hold on to their trips to Cancun.