More Evidence Supports Massive Asteroid Strike

InnerPeace Volunteers writes "From a BBC Sci/Tech article: The idea is that a giant asteroid about 10 kilometres wide, travelling at 90,000 km/hour slammed into the Earth at the southern margin of North America. This was a case of global devastation rather than North American catastrophe. The asteroid devastated pretty much everything."

Comments

"Suddenly disappeared..."

[Philippe]

I want to point out that the dinosaurs did not disappear "suddenly", 65MY ago. The decline of dinosaurs began millions of years before that fateful iridium trace in the geological record (aka the cretaceous-tertiary or K-T boundary), and dinosaurs were found in the fossil record on top of that boundary. It's not like they disappeared in one, ten or a hundred years. It took millions of years (tens of thousands of generations) for the dinosaurs to disappear.

Philippe

This is akin to the "Cambrian explosion" theory where at the beginning of the Cambrian, there was suddenly (here's that word again) "exponential" increase in diversity of form (see the Burgess shale for an example). But if you look at it in linear time, and not in compressed (geological) time, the exponential curve looks more and more linear. An explosion that takes hundreds of millions of years to occur is not really an explosion, wouldn't you say?