Far be it from me to quibble with a scientific “dream team”, which has converted into Settled Science the hypothesis that an asteroid strike 65 million years ago extinguished the dinosaurs. Certainly, the event that it describes would have wiped out a lot of things:
It would take a mighty rock to do in the mighty lizards known as dinosaurs, and on that count the Chicxulub asteroid fits the bill. It was big – more than seven miles across, three times the width of Manhattan – and it was moving fast – 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet. When it hit, the explosion unleashed a billion times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, says Gareth Collins of Imperial College London.
In a paper published last year, Collins found that the asteroid in 30 seconds drilled an initial crater 19 miles deep, nearly penetrating the Earth's crust. Earthquakes of up to magnitude 11 – 1,000 times more powerful than the recent Chilean earthquake – shook the area, and tsunamis more than 300 feet high inundated nearbycoasts. . . .
The impact was so violent that it melted and vaporized both the asteroid itself and the spot the asteroid hit. Within an hour, melted rock had splattered as far as northern Canada, says David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. An immense plume of vaporized and melted material burst through the atmosphere and into outer space. Within a few hours, tiny drops from that plume began raining down through the atmosphere all across the Earth's surface.
As they fell, these drops grew hotter, literally broiling the planet for several minutes, according to another 2009study. . . .
The combination of dust, soot and caustic chemicals filling the air blotted out the sun, Kring says. The sky close to the crater first glowed red then went pitch black. All over the globe, a biblical darkness fell, lasting perhaps a week, maybe nearly a year.
The darkness shut down photosynthesis, the process by which plants capture sunlight to grow. Huge swathes of forest died.
All very spectacular. My scintilla of a doubt is this: Crocodiles existed in the late Cretaceous and survived to the present day. They do not strike me as the creatures best suited to living through a succession of broiling rain and prolonged, presumably chilly darkness. Were they just lucky? Did a crocodilian Deukalion and Pyrrha somehow escape the cataclysm and repopulate the terrestrial marshlands?
Maybe. But I still like the theory that big game hunters from the stars took a fancy to dinosaur-hunting safaris, while overlooking less spectacular reptiles.
"How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!"
- Lewis Carroll
No good reason...
I linked to Stromata blog when I was using the word mufsidun, which I always have to look up because I keep on wanting to spell it musfidun... And, then I went on to your home page of April 18th, which led me to American Thinker's Birther piece, which led me to the Comments section on American Thinker, which creeped me out at how everyone is praising the nutburger that wrote the American Thinker column, which made me return to your blog to see if there was anything that I felt like commenting on via your blog as I thought a note would let you know that you are being read but...
There was nothing I really wanted to comment upon.
Thus, I give you Lewis Carroll.
Be well.
Posted by: Moishe3rd | Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 07:53 PM