Boffins: We know what KILLED the DINOS – and it wasn't just an asteroid For decades, scientists have been arguing over what killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago – an asteroid or geological activity. Now it turns out both sides may be right. In 1981, scientist Luis Walter Alvarez proposed that a massive asteroid slammed into the Earth, causing large-scale damage and clouds of toxic chemicals …
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I still find it odd that modern birds are among the "lizard-hipped" dinosaurs, not the "bird-hipped" ones.
Anyway, even a child can tell you that the "bird-hipped" dinosaurs also thrived right through the Plasticine epoch.
"I still find it odd that modern birds are among the "lizard-hipped" dinosaurs, not the "bird-hipped" ones."
That's scientific progress for you. Taxonomy has only really started to become an exact science since DNA analysis. Unfortunately when you have to rely on paper books, issuing corrections becomes very difficult.
In this rather old infographic from New Scientist the Deccan Traps event is marked with "probably no extinctions". I need a new infographic!
The Random Downvoter strikes again!
(Or maybe someone just really loves that old New Scientist infographic?)
In my day, infographics were big folded-up sheets of paper glued into issues of National Geographic, and you could update them with a marker. I used to have a terrific one - probably hilariously inaccurate as a picture of current evidence these days - that showed historical relationships among ethnic groups in various parts of the world, with known episodes of divergence and interbreeding. As a kid I found it endlessly fascinating: "oh, so that's when the Mongols invaded Poland!". Today, when a million new infographics are churned out daily by interns with five minutes' Googlpedia browsing, they've lost their charm. Also these newfangled horseless carriages amirite?
It was a mistaken foray into time travel, we were farming the dinosaurs for meat and shipping it to the 25th century. By the time we'd realised that we'd culled too many dinosaurs and the 26th century liberals started complaining the only option was to drop a large chunk of martian moon onto the earth to cover up what we'd been doing. Unfortunately removing a moon from Mars required moving it and destroying it forming the asteroid belt at the same time. The knock on effect was to cause massive climate change to martian causing the martian atmosphere to evaporate till all that was left is what you see now. Oh well, no harm done :)
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but I thought this link had been posited before.
I'm sure I remember reading that at the time of the Chicxulub impact, the Deccan Traps area would have been almost directly opposite on the other side of the Earth, and therefore were very likely to have been caused by the shockwave of the Chicxulub event - much like the exit wound from a bullet's impact.
"I'm sure I remember reading that at the time of the Chicxulub impact, the Deccan Traps area would have been almost directly opposite on the other side of the Earth,"
I was told exactly the same thing by the geologist brought along to explain the interesting bits of Iceland to us when I went to see the annular eclipse of 2003 there. (Very strange looking north across the Arctic to watch an eclipse on the other side of the planet.)
"So what lies at the other side of the Earth of the Ontong Java Eruption"
The antipode of Java is Colombia and Venezuela, and I don't think there are any major impact craters there. However it doesn't follow that even if the Deccan super-eruption was triggered by an impact shockwave, that all super-eruptions are. If that were the case you'd also have to start wondering what was opposite the Yellowstone supervolcano (whose antipode is in the southern Indian Ocean near the French Southern & Antarctic Islands) and the New Zealand supervolcano (whose antipode is in Portugal.) So clearly while the Deccan supervolcano may have been influenced by the KT impactor, the others likely had different causes.
I propose, that when a big meteor hits hits earth and causes a major crater, that creates schokwaves that propagate throgh earth and focus at the other side. The power focused at the other side of the planet causes major local volcanism and magma upheaval.
You see, that the Deccan traps are just at the opposite side of the earth than the meteorite hit spot on the Yacatan peninsula.
Also, when you look at planet Mars, there is this peculiar point of ancient volcanism, Olympons mons, the biggest volcano of the solar system, created by upwelled magma. Just at the exact other side of the planet Mars is a huge impact site, that has clearly penetrated the crust of the planet in distant past.
Big impacts cause big volcanism at the other side of the planet. Please sperad the word.
I'm not sure people are ready for the truth but here goes.
God created earth and feeling quite pleased with himself had a vacation leaving his then young son JC in charge. When god got back he saw that JC had created dinosaurs to play with and promptly unleashed his wrath destroying all the dinosaurs saying to JC "Oh FFS how am I going to explain this one?"
Is that given along enough period, unimaginable coincidences occur.
The Deccan Traps + Chicxulub combination scenario has been floating around for more than 20 years but normally the hypothesis is that the Traps had been poisoning off the ecosystem for a considerable period before the asteroid hit - there is evidence of declining biodiversity leading up to the KT extinction.
Chicxulub wasn't a particularly large impact in the overall scheme of things and under normal circumstances wouldn't have caused mass extinctions. It's not even close to the scale of the impacts mentioned on Mars and Mercury - which would have sterilised the planet if they'd hit earth. The main reason it caused so much damage was that it hit a shallow sea == evaporated limestone (CO2 pulse) + similar amounts of water vapour - basically the worst possible place to be hit, got hit.
I remain to be convinced that an impact this small could have triggered the Traps (This has been argued back and forth for decades too. The relative locations have been pointed out several times)
"I remain to be convinced that an impact this small could have triggered the Traps" -- Alan Brown
Whilst I agree the impact was 'small' compared to other events (e.g. the P-T) it was still in the top five known Earth impacts; around 100 million megatons TNT.
For context, that's about about 20x the boom of that big chunk of SL-9 hitting Jupiter. It's about equivalent to 4,000 tonnes of matter->energy conversion or, if you want something more concrete, over ten thousand times the current global nuclear arsenal, which is over twenty million times the total explosive use of World War II (Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only 1% of the WWII explosive load).
"it was still in the top five known Earth impacts"
Emphasis on known. We keep finding bigger and bigger old ones.
If you look at the size of the crater on mars or the one on Mercury in relation to planetary size, you're talking about rocks at least an order of magnitude larger than the K-T impactor. The point being that when they get that large, they're planet-sterilizers - not just mass-extinction events.
As for energy: A storm passing over the Southern Alps releases more energy in a couple of hours than the entire world's nuclear arsenal at the height of the cold war. It's all relative.
The point remains that _something_ was already causing larger species to die off well before Chicxulub hit. The Deccan traps remain the most likely culprit for that, as well as for the long pause afterwards, but I feel it's unlikely that the eruptions were _caused_ by the impact.
"Chicxulub wasn't a particularly large impact in the overall scheme of things"
What.
Bullet hole is just the third from the top. Bronze medal.
Can we please stop wasting time discussing how the dinosaurs died out already and focus on the real matter of bringing them back to life already! I want my real Jurassic park!
Just think of the television show opportunities. Big BC brother where we see if the t-rex or the z list celebrities win the challenge and get to eat (the loser).
Or My big fat Cretaceous Wedding!
(Correction suggestion sent).
"Tertiary" no longer has an official stratigraphic rank according to this pdf and the period immediately following the Cretaceous is the Paleogene, making the boundary in question the K-Pg. Doesn't sound as nice as KT but no point fighting it, unless you like Pluto-really-is-a-planet fights.
A breakdown of the planet's regulatory system where teeth and claw growth caused a wave of violence that loosened the fabric of reptilian society coupled with the unavailability of contraception and the soaring cost of reptilian education and healthcare lead to mass migrations causing the death of millions.
It was a period of extreme social injustice that gave rise to the Reptilian Labour Party ending in mass extinction.
That had the mass extinction 65 million years ago been only slightly less severe the trend towards increasing brain volume and decreasing size could have led to a bipedal, tool using "dinosauroid" about 12.3MY ago which would then have become the dominant intelligent species on Earth.
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