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New NASA Maps Show A Bad Day On Earth
Stephen Lau writes "ScienceDaily has an article talking about the new NASA maps that reveal the geography of the North American continent in amazing detail. One of the maps provides strong evidence of a 112 mile wide, 3000 foot deep impact crater which they believe was the comet/asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and more than 70% of Earth's living species 65 million years ago."
They've been talking about an asteroid landing in the Gulf of Mexico since before I studied Geology in 1990. I remember being taught about the ejector blanket evidence they'd discovered in amongst the rock layers. The actual crater is rather harder to find due to it being submerged and eroded - it's not like it's obvious like the one in the desert in Arizona.
Actually it was a GOOD day for the earth as it got a major influx of material and upped its accretion rate, helping out in the race to be the biggest object orbiting the sun, though it still trails several other bodies, as of this writing. It WAS a BAD day for the life forms that inhabited the skin of the earth, but they didn't contribute a lot to the total mass. It WAS a GOOD day, though, for the minor life forms called mammals, as many of their predators and competitors were disposed of. Tough call on Good vs. Bad.
It what I always believe.
No other disater was bigger than the YellowStone Volcano.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Um, you can't carbon date an asteroid. You can only carbon date organic material, and that only up to maybe 10,000 years old or so.
If you want to date rocks, you have to use other forms of radiometric dating, which is what I assume you were referring to.
I've often wondered what I'd do if there were some kind of mass catastrophy headed our way. And I don't mean Osama setting off a Nuke on the east coast, or something, I'm talking about real apocolyptic stuff, the stuff that would destroy our entire society. Of course the first thought is to stock up on Guns, Food, Water and Toilet Paper. Build a shelter of some kind, that sort of stuff.
Then I'm reminded that in those situations, the people that die are often the lucky ones. So I'm torn, try to survive or just give up. I'm not sure I'd want to live a life in a post apocolyptic world anyway. So I say when the big one hits, I only need 3 supplies. A Ladder, A Lawn Chair and A bottle of Southern Comfort. This way at least I have a decent view.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
So, through most of the 90's we accepted that a single impact event wiped out the dinosaurs. Now, however, more impact craters are being found to have been formed within the crucial 65 million time frame (a search on multiple impact and dinosaur extinction). This is good news because perhaps a single big asteroid might not be fatal, and we may be more able to detect a swarm of meteors.
Anyway, science is a self correcting system, and at this point is may be best just to say it is likely that at least one asteroid hit the earth and was a major contributor to the extinction of the dinosaur. But I know that is too long for a soundbyte.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It pretty much could happen anytime.
v ol canoes_script.shtml
http://www.solcomhouse.com/yellowstone.htm
for maps and other graphics and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/super
for the transcript of the BBC's program. The truly scary part is the correlation of the Toba supervolcano 74K ago, and a human genetic bottleneck which happened around the same time -
a bottleneck caused by not enough of a gene pool. That one nearly took us out, and the next one, who knows?
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
If this is where the meteor hit the earth, where's the meteor? We see all these impact crators, but nobody seems to have found - or at least mention having found - the meteor. It must've been one huge SOB, so why haven't they found it?
Could this (looking for a crater hole) be akin to something like seeing shapes and animals in the clouds? Or along the lines of finding the face of a man on mars? Topography is very diverse and complex, and there are millions of weird variations on the earth. There's a large crater in the Sea of Japan, too - has this one been discredited as causing the great evolutionary distinction of the dinosaurs?
What if - maybe - these "caters" weren't caused by meteorites or comets, or anything like that at all? What if they're something like 'sink holes' (not the right term - what I'm thinking of are the holes that are made by fresh-water springs) that once spewed up large amounts of water to flood the earth? (another extinction theory that's equally plauseable, it's just that people disvow it because it 'supports' creationism) These 'craters' could be the result of water flowing back into the sinkhole after this flood (caused by high-presure volcanic action?), bringing large amounts of soil with them - the water had to go somewhere, right?
If anyone has links or other information on where these craters went, I'd be glad to see them. It's pretty obvious to me that something that big doesn't just disappear.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In a war people are violent, often long after the war. But that's more than just the collapse of society, that's an extension of society's self-destruction. Few apocolyptic scenarios involve mass societal collapse as a cause..
Step 1) Shock/Fear: Mass fear (will might die, my family might die, where will I live?, what will I eat?).
Step 2) Hysteria: People vauling their families or in worst cases, themselves over anything, including common human decency (trampling over people, driving over people, etc). At this stage, we become primally instinctive; we're in self-defense mode.. We're not able to think rationally.
Step 3) Anarchy: Hysteria slowly calms down.. We're no longer screaming (though many are still crying). Depression will start kicking in for some.. Many will lose hope. Many will start to think about the future. They'll quickly rationalize lawless activities. Rape, looting, general acts of violence.. People will chant the "end of the world", and try and live out their fantacies.
Step 4) Pragmatism: As the remaining loyalist military/police kills off the most violent offenders, the more remaining people are in three camps.
a) The "victims" that will not be able to recover on their own; they will need to be followers.
b) The "leaders", these will be people that will try and help out; working through the wake of disaster. These will be the optimisits. Being somewhat altruistic, they will fight for what they consider right, even in the face of dispair.
c) The selfish. These are people who will quickly surmise that it will take decades (if ever) to recover, and in the mean time, we will be living in the stone age. There will not be enough resources to sustain the remaining levels of population. Fresh water will be virtually non-existant due to polluting drainage, and lack of pump-work. Rain-water is likely to be hazardous, and possibly droubting. Thus the selfish will realize that if they forcibly coerse other's, the "leaders" (including the military) will have them killed. Thus they will subtly backstab, usurping power (at least within their community).
The problem is that only those smart enough to survive will become leaders. But as a follower, you can't be sure that your local leaders aren't secretly maliscious.
The fact of the matter is that people will die due to shortages, and in the face of this, the majority of people will act accordingly, even in the long run.
This will continue until either the population has dwindled to a sufficiently small group (which is unlikely given the then-newly-encouraged birthrate), or complex and corrupt power-systems will develop, which can contain the selfish class. Tyranical Dictatorships are the only systems that can contain anarchy. It is only given enough time and prosperity that benevolant systems can prevail.
In short, we're talking hundreds if not thousands of years to rebuild society.
If you're into apacolyptic tales, Revelation and Various profits (Nostradamus, etc) tend to talk about an apocalyptic aftermath which takes hundreds or thousands of years. So in short, I disagree that a cataclysmic event would have to be radio-enduced.
-Michael
And yet very few are aware of the fact that according to the fossil record, the Dino's were pretty much finished long before that blanket was laid..
I think this reply is worth more mention and a better mod. From my studies in Geology, I can't remember the exact figures but the fossil records of dinosaurs finish largely before the evidence of this comet in the rock strata.
This would indicate that the dinos were already well on their way out and that this comet just made sure of it.
I also remember being shown evidence of a massive but slow and progressive climate change happening beforehand which could be attributed to the dinos pegging it.
Of course this is all circumstantial because the fossil record is massively incomplete. Just because the fossils start to disappear doesn't mean the species did, it just means that for some reason none of the species were fossilised.
Dates are very general aswell. The further back you go with radio-isoptope dating, the more inaccurate it becomes so you can only generalise and hope you are in the right area.
Just remember that if the world didn't suck we'd all fall off.