Maybe an asteroid didn't wipe out the Dinosaurs after all

Volcanism around the same time created the Siberian traps, the combination of the Deccan and Siberian traps along with one or more asteroid impacts would mean that Dino and his friends had no chance.

Page 17 of this month's(Dec.) Sky and telescope makes the following point on this subject:

"A titanic asteroid collision out beyond Mars some 160 million years ago......produced the 3,000 known members of the Baptistina family of asteroids...caused a prolonged asteroid shower peaking from 100 to 50 million years ago.....Chronium in the Chicxulub debris on Earth strengthens the Baptistina connection."

There could well have been a whole shower of them.

Large swathes of Siberia and India were molten lakes around that time.

Just volcanism?

Peter.

By the way,

The famous Iridium Layer which is the smoking gun of the Yukatan impact goes right through a Deccen lava layer.

This proves that that the Mexican impact occured during the Deccan eruptions.

(This story is an ancient one by the way. Nothing new about this discussion.)


Peter.

filebox.vt.edu/artsci/geology/mclean/Din.../pages/studentv.html

I wont go into the Permian extinction which put Earth into a Mars like state.

The Deccan Trapps may well have aggrivated the situation but where did the Iridium come from? And not alone that but Luis Alverez father Walter I believe- a nuclear chemist- also got some results with Rhenium in the K-T bounary.

Iridium and Rhenium are extra terrestrial. If they were somewhere deep inside the Earth then they should show up in the Deccan strata. AS far as I know they don't!

www.springerlink.com/content/pk22765973212w45/

It has been suggested that the eruption of the Deccan Trapps has contributed to the events of the Cretaceous-Tertiary transition as a possible cause of Iridium enrichment and/or other physicochemical disturbances. However, no precise chronological framework was available for the emplacement of these Trapps, which form one of the largest known occurrences of continental basalt flows. A joint Indian-French project, still under way, is providing more accurate informations about the chronology of the Deccan Trapps and its possible implications for Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary events.
[end quote]

Okay okay I know it is over twenty years ago! For "I believe" read "further research is necessary"
But who will fund it?

For such a critique read: filebox.vt.edu/artsci/geology/mclean/Din...n/pages/ltrkerr.html

And what about www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/gold99/pdf/7063.pdf

Well what about an extraterrestrial impact when the volcano was active?
Or as you might say at a conference "na na nana na. Correlation isnt causailty."

There is also the as yet unproven "crater chain" theory. So where is the beef? subducted? Under the atlantic? Your guess is as good as mine but there are no known co incident craters to add to Chicxulub.
Pope and Ocampo are the guys for that stuff I believe.

Oh and the two mathematicians spring to ming. Odd that maths guys got interested in paelentology - Raup and Sepskoski. great stuff. Added rigour to geology! (as if rocks can get stiffer).

Here is the original:

Raup, D. M. & Sepkoski, J. J. Jr. 1984. Periodicity of extinctions in the geologic past. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 81, 801–5.
www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/81/3/801

By the way,

The famous Iridium Layer which is the smoking gun of the Yukatan impact goes right through a Deccen lava layer.

This proves that that the Mexican impact occured during the Deccan eruptions.

Peter. Have you any citation for this claim?

By the way two related points.

The famous "Burgess shale" is one of very few sites around the world which is packed with fossils. there is another in a dover like cliff in Denmark.
Stevns Klint

In fact I believe a Dane preceeded Alvarez in the discovery and had already thought of and got a spanish nuclear physicish to start looking for minute concentrations of Iridium. But though he had the results BEFORE he actually only got it published AFTER Alvarez. alvarez got the nobel prize.

I think this is the alvarez paper. His Da (who won a different Noble prize) gave him a hand so TWO Alvarez's are cited Walter and Luis:

Alvarez, L. W., W. Alvarez, et al. (1980). "Extraterrestrial Cause For the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction - Experimental Results and Theoretical Interpretation." Science 208(4448): 1095-1108.

i think the Dane published in Nature only three months later! Mind you alvarez credited him years later with the discovery in "T Rex and the Crater of Doom"

Second is the idea of a dark star or red dwarf orbiting out in the outher solar System as a mechanism for the periodicity of the extraterrestrial impacts. Richard Muller a physist was appraoched by Alvarez in a "chat" on day in his office (the both worked at the same university Berkeley - incidentally named for the Irish Bishop). Alverez showed Muller the Raup and Sepskowsky graph asking what could cause periodicity:

muller.lbl.gov/papers/explot.GIF

Arrows every 26 Million years.

IIRC Muller questioned the results and suggested Rhenium but alverez had already done that unknown to Muller and got similar results.

straight away Muller suggested a dark star! not alone that but he got out a pen and worked out the orbit on a piece of paper!

More about it here:
muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-nem.htm
For other theories on the periodicity (and for some very good science fantasy and science fiction) see :
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)
muller.lbl.gov/

By the way,

The famous Iridium Layer which is the smoking gun of the Yukatan impact goes right through a Deccen lava layer.

This proves that that the Mexican impact occured during the Deccan eruptions.

Peter. Have you any citation for this claim?

By the way two related points.

The famous "Burgess shale"

I forgot my first point and went off topic!

Point being. there are three to five sites IIRC. And the Burgess on (discovered by accudent when Burgess was out horse riding) is only about the size of a house roof!

Second is the idea of a dark star or red dwarf orbiting out in the outher solar System as a mechanism for the periodicity of the extraterrestrial impacts. Richard Muller a physist was appraoched by Alvarez in a "chat" on day in his office (the both worked at the same university Berkeley - incidentally named for the Irish Bishop). Alverez showed Muller the Raup and Sepskowsky graph asking what could cause periodicity:

muller.lbl.gov/papers/explot.GIF

Arrows every 26 Million years.

IIRC Muller questioned the results and suggested Rhenium but alverez had already done that unknown to Muller and got similar results.

straight away Muller suggested a dark star! not alone that but he got out a pen and worked out the orbit on a piece of paper!

Nemesis is literally a rather far-out theory. There's a good balanced article about it on space.com. The ending in particular is important to bear in mind when talking about this:

Whether or not he finds evidence for Nemesis in Moon dust, it's clear that Muller won't stop looking. He is a man of enduring confidence. But he is also a remarkably conservative scientist, quick as anyone to point out that there is no proof until there is proof.

"I'm realistic," he said. "I may be wrong."

And he recognizes that if the Death Star is not found, the whole idea could become a real Nemesis for the big thinker who dreamed it up.

The full article is here: www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsyst...emesis_010320-1.html

Bart.