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."

Comments

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Malc]

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.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Drachemorder]

"Carbon dating the ring shows that it occurred 65 million years ago"

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.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[fermion]

I don't remember when the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction was recognized as a good possibility, but it must have late 80s. At that time we didn't know if was one or many. I know that in the early 90s the the Yucatan crater was identified as the most likely culprit, as it was big enough and contemporaneous with the extinction which put the single asteroid extinction at the forefront.

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.