Slashdot Mirror
New Evidence About 'The Great Dying' 250 Million Years Ago
PornMaster writes "The Guardian is reporting that scientists have found the first direct evidence that the killoff of 80% of land species and 95% of marine species 2 billion years ago was due to a meteor." The project web site has more info, maps, etc.
So uh... A giant meteor hit the earth and all the dinosaurs turned into giant roasted chickens?
New clues to 2bn-year-old murder /. habit of not bothering to RTFA.
A buried crater off Australia could be the first direct evidence of a celestial assassin that wiped out more than 80% of life on Earth 250m years ago. Obviously, Guardian headline writers follow the
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Mmmm... unprocessed gasoline...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
They found the weapons of mass destruction!
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
more than 80% of terrestrial life?
more than 95% of marine life?
that would mean that whatever we have today, evolved from >20% / >5% of those species that survived?
that's a whole lotta evolution if you ask me.
not "first evidence"...
just like in judicial cases you can have circumstantial evidence, scientific hypotheses can be supported by indirect evidence.
I knew I should not have put that giant can of Lysol in the time machine. But I did it anyway. Sorry.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
When I heard the story on NPR yesterday, it said the event was dated at around 250 million years ago. That's what the body of the linked article says too. Somehow, the headline has been changed to say 2 billion. Funny.
There wouldn't have been much on land at 2Ga.
I remember some Discovery piece about another giant meteor hitting around area of the Yucatan several hundred million years ago. I could swear that they were using that crator as evidence of the great die off too.
"...scientists have found the first direct evidence..."
Direct evidence my arse. Scientists have found a few holes in the ground and some sediments. It amazes me that so many people just blindly accept these theories (and they are only theories) about meteors wiping most of the life out on earth long ago.
Two billion years ago there existed only prokaryotic bacteria. The impact the articles are talking about was the end of the Permian era. It happened about 250 million years ago (as stated in the article). Both the Guardian's and Slashdot's articles are mistitled.
So... It's a big meteor, or a volcano or maybe, just maybe... It was caused by a verneshot
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
That said, perhaps you would field the evidentiary findings that indicate this is not true? If we have 0 'reason to believe' something else is the case, an 1 'reason to believe' this is the case, where would the smart money bet?
Thinking outside my Head
there can be hundreds of pieces of indirect evidence and logical arguments supporting a meteor hit.
this is the first direct evidence i.e. they found the meteor (or what's left of it).
I'd say that if everything points to a meteor, and then you find the actual meteor, then that's as far from "sketchy" as possible and has very little to do with "belief".
I wonder if historians 2 billion years from now will come to a similar conclusion when they find the 125 mile-wide crater in Redmond.
You never really see figures about how fast, and how big that chunk of rock (?) was. Gimme a nice scientific factoid, in standard Volkswagen units or something.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Finding a very thin layer of irridium in the rocks laid down at the very end of the Permian would be compelling evidence. A layer of irridium, together with the crater in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mexican coast, made a good argument of what caused the dinosaurs to go at the end of the Cretaceous period.
So, a giant meteor crashes off the coast of a continent that has some of the strangest creatures on the planet, Austrailians. Oh, and think of all the weird animals there too.
The BBC have a much better version of the same story with addition information and some on the opposing view points BBC.co.uk
The earth was created in 7 days. Dinosaurs are a fabrication by atheists. God is perfect and didn't need to practice by making Dinosaurs, you twits. The fact is that they never existed!
Look at it another way: this just means that 80% of terrestrial life and 95% of marine life are completely useless.
I stuck some data in the impact effects simulator (http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/), took reasonable guess at most of it. Anyone else more knowledgable, please correct.
Distance from Impact: 1000.00 km = 621.00 miles
Projectile Diameter: 28280.20 m = 92759.06 ft = 17.56 miles
Projectile Density: 3000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 30.00 km/s = 18.63 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 3000 kg/m3
Target Type: Competent Rock or saturated soil
Energy:
1.60 x 1025 Joules = 3.82 x 109 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 2.6 x 109years
Crater Size:
Transient Crater Diameter: 173.30 km = 107.62 miles
Final Crater Diameter: 340.69 km = 211.57 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
Thermal Radiation:
Time for maximum radiation: 16.79 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius: 425.5 km = 264.2 miles
The fireball appears 96.7 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 6.13 x 108 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 655 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 936.0
Effects of Thermal Radiation:
Clothing ignites
Much of the body suffers third degree burns
Newspaper ignites
Plywood flames
Deciduous trees ignite
Grass ignites
Seismic Effects:
The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 200.0 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 11.0 (This is greater than any earthquake in recorded history)
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 1000 km:
VI. Felt by all. Many frightened and run outdoors. Persons walk unsteadily. Windows, dishes, glassware broken. Knickknacks, books, etc., off shelves. Pictures off walls. Furniture moved or overturned. Weak plaster and masonry D cracked. Small bells ring (church, school). Trees, bushes shaken (visibly, or heard to rustle).
VII. Difficult to stand. Noticed by drivers of motor cars. Hanging objects quiver. Furniture broken. Damage to masonry D, including cracks. Weak chimneys broken at roof line. Fall of plaster, loose bricks, stones, tiles, cornices (also unbraced parapets and architectural ornaments). Some cracks in masonry C. Waves on ponds; water turbid with mud. Small slides and caving in along sand or gravel banks. Large bells ring. Concrete irrigation ditches damaged.
Masonry C. Ordinary workmanship and mortar; no extreme weaknesses like failing to tie in at corners, but neither reinforced nor designed against horizontal forces.
Masonry D. Weak materials, such as adobe; poor mortar; low standards of workmanship; weak horizontally.
Ejecta:
The ejecta will arrive approximately 494.4 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 9.4 m = 30.83 ft
Mean Fragment Diameter: 5.4 mm = 0.2107 inches
Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive at approximately 3333.3 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 920445.5 Pa = 9.2045 bars = 130.7033 psi
Max wind velocity: 661.5 m/s = 1479.8 mph
Sound Intensity: 119 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:
Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Multistory steel-framed office-type buildings will suffer extreme frame distortion, incipient collapse.
Highway truss bridges will collapse.
Highway girder bridges will collapse.
Glass windows will shatter.
Cars and trucks will be largely displaced and grossly distorted and will require rebuilding before use.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.
stuff
In the case of the giant meteor coming to earth I think they tend to call it "insourcing". But it's all terminology of course. In the end, it's all because of foreigners!
Daniel
Carpe Diem
This article is incorrect convieniently(sp?) enough I was listening to the NPR talk show yesterday and they very clearly said that is was 250 million years ago, which they said was the same that the tested core samples came out to be. They found the site they believed was it a crater on the sea floor with nearly a mile of dirt ontop of it, by using the same techniques that people looking for oil would. Incidentally the core samples were obtained 60 years ago while doing oil prospecting.
Hope that's atleast a little informative.
-RevSin
The article tells us that the event happened 250 million years ago.
It's always good to rtfa..
:^)
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
Years ago, when Mariner 10 went and disovered the Caloris Basin and wierd terrain on Mercury, I immediately wondered if something like that could happen on Earth. I was one of the first to notice that the volcanic Deccan Traps that formed in India at the time of the dinosaur extinction just happened to be located (after taking contintental drift into account) on the opposite side of the Earth from Chixulub. (As I recall, I wrote a letter to Scientific American about it, way back then...but they didn't think it publishable) And now the evidence seems to be accumulating, in favor of exactly such scenarios.
I am reminded of my undergraduate geology professor's first lecture to our class. He took a candle and covered it with a jar. The candle went out. Then he asked the class for a show of hands, how many people thought the candle went out because all of the available oxygen had been consumed, and how many people thought the flame ceased because (if memory serves) the jar had become saturated with phogistan. Of course the vote was 100% for the oxygen answer. He then explained that 100 years ago, we all would have failed the exam. He then went on to discuss "vestigal organs," the fossil record, and other models that have not held up well in all cases.
His point? "Evidence" can often be made to support any number of theories, among them the 4.5 billion year age of the earth or in this case the cause of a mass extinction. In the future we will know more, but we should never assume we have all the answers right now.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
So my knowledge that 1+1=2 is probabilistic?
You're not "supposed to" believe it, where did you get that idea? Clearly you have no idea how science functions, why don't you learn what science is before publicly criticizing it? It is obvious from your post that you don't even understand the basics of the scientific method, despite the fact that you think you "know a bit" about science.
If you actually read up a bit about this, the scientists here are basically saying that this MIGHT BE a possible cause of one of the great extinctions (read "more research required"). Furthermore, this is now just one new "HYPOTHESIS" against two other major "HYPOTHESES" that alread exist that proposing other "POSSIBLE" reasons for this great extinction.
Certainly nobody has asked you to "believe" any of these possible explanations, and none of the scientists involved have claimed that their hypotheses are 'the truth' either. In fact, with things like this, scientists never really decide that any one theory is "the truth" - they basically often settle on a theory that is "the most likely" - they, however, ALWAYS "leave the door open" to other possible explanations that may appear in future that are better. Always. (This is all in refreshing contrast to religions like Christianity, where you are in fact expected to 100% completely believe something regardless of whether or not there is really evidence for it.)
The slashdot blurb has also spun this thing completely wrong. So even worse, now you make decisions about scientific theories based on a slashdot blurb. Sheesh.
It would seem the moderators don't see alternative viewpoints as neither valid nor worthy of discussion. I thought /. was about voicing on-topic opinions. Apparently I was wrong.
Visualize Whirled Peas
Like what?
But, when the science claims that then have evidence but no direct evidence I am supposed to believe it.
No. You are supposed to think that it represents a likely scenario and it is a plausible explanation of what happened. There is no "belief" in science, other than as a figure of speech.
Now we have the volcanic Siberian outpourings of the Permian era, accompanied by a giant meteor impact in Australia (and after taking 200 megayears of continental drift into account, they could well have been on opposite sides of the Earth at that time).
First let me say that I am a Christian, and as such believe that God created life, the universe and everything. I have no idea if the seven days were literal 24 hour periods. It wouldn't bother me if they were 1 second periods. God is all powerful and there is nothing that He can not do.
That aside, I believe your arguement would be easily refuted by evolutionists. The meteor in question only killed 80% of the land animals and 95% of marine life. This means that the remaining creatures (who would have arrived supposedly from billions of years of evolution) continued to evolve. Additionally, this continued evolution would have occurred at a much faster rate given the fact that there was virtually no competition and a vastly open ecosystem to spread out and diversify in.
How on Earth you arrive at that conclusion? The big extinction didn't kill everything or wind speciation back to step 1. The meteor didn't kill off 80% of species and then magically devolve the remaining 20%.
Ultimately, I think, it comes down to faith.
No, no it does not. These scientific theories really do work, as you witness every day when you use a computer or a TV set or a DVD player. Whether scientists are right about, say, the speed of light or radioactivity does not need to be taken on faith.
Remember, creationists aren't just disputing some evolutionary biologists somewhere. They have to dispute physics, geology, cosmology, basically anything that gives you a dating method or shows what the place was like billions of years ago. Just about every branch of science eventually matures to the point that it burps out evidence the Earth or universe is old.
X
they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
No.
Why post about something you clearly have no interest in understanding?
_All life_ didn't die out 250M years ago. All the _evolution_ done up until then lived on.
it's in my head
Now, instead of four billion years, they've got to explain in it 250 million years. Given that they've already posited that mankind's ancestors appeared about 50 million years ago, they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The meteor killed 80% of life, not species. I'm sure there were small animals left, something like insects (that's multicelled), maybe also other small animals like lizzards that live in caves that were able to adapt. Even though most life was killed, I'm sure a lot of species survived.
And even if that wasn't true, and all multicellular life were wiped out, evolution is STILL a better theory than "The invisible man in the sky made it all with magic". That's just silly, and is a fairytale best reserved for kids.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Could you explain exactly who is "blindly accepting" these theories? We all know they're "just theories".
BTW they found a bit more than just "sediments" and a "few holes in the ground". It does seem likely in fact that they have found a meteor impact crater, just not necessarily one that resulted in a major extinction.
Actually, several clues tend to prove a meteor isn't the cause of permian extinction. For instance, there should be a thin layer of irridium (or any other stuff) coming from the meteor or its explosion/impact, and laying on the ground after the blast... Also their proof about having found the meteor impact site doesn't seem very convincing.
Now, they need to explain why we don't find such clues, and they haven't done it yet.
For now, the only convincing scenario involves volcanism and oceanic methan tanks (methan is stored inside ocean, both dissolved and inside seabed).
Big volcanism activity in what is today Siberia (and there are proofs of it) increases mean temperature for about 5-10 C by producing greenhouse effect. Then with such increase, methan starts to evaporate from ocean, induces more greenhouse effect, and mean temperature goes up 5-10C more. At the same time, it kills life in the ocean.
That 10-20C increase in mean temperature is enough to kill 80% of species on the surface of the ground.
So that scenario explains everything better than the meteor theory.
Forgive my bad English... I think that this explanation could be found on some american scientific website, so feel free to post the link.
Oh, and you can find more info there
You are using "old-school" ideas of abiogenesis to back yourself up. In fact, it is not very hard for organic compounds to self-organize into the needed components of life. Take for instance the cell membrane, this is a sphere of phospholipids. If one just takes phospholipids and adds them in water, they self-organize into a sphere and provide a membrane.
You may ask where these organic compounds came from, well a classic experiment (earned the researcher a Nobel prize I think) called the Miller-Urey experiment showed that if one simulated the conditions on a primordial earth, one got organic compounds (ranging from your simple alkanes to the building blocks of protiens, amino acids) were formed. And these processes happen relatively quickly, thus I do not see the evolution of life as being improbable.
If any of my facts are wrong please correct, if you want back-up for my statements, feel free to request it.
What crap. Stop trolling. The evidence in science is based on pre-observed behaviour and hypothesis.
And they are just collecting evidence to substantiate their hypothesis.
Religious claims cannot be recreated. A scientific claim can.
Tomorrow if this is disproved, you can throw this out of the window. I'm yet to see any religious figurehead materialize before me -- that still hasn't made any religious believers throw out religion.
Science is based on assumptions, which evolve into hypothesis and are substantiated with evidence. Plain and simple. When another kind of evidence is found, science simply changes it's assumptions and hypothesis to fit the facts.
Besides, whether or not you believe it is entirely upto you. Your soul is not going to hell if you don't. It's just the most plausible thing that might have happened, and in the light of no other explanations, this seems just about right.
And look at the choice of words from the article -- they think, they believe etc. -- they do not say, we are so damn sure that THIS happened.
Have you been to the sun? How do you know it's full of Hydrogen and Helium? It's based on an assumption, that was later on substantiated with evidence (spectra of the sunlight). Have you seen a Black Hole? It was based on an assumption that it's quite likely Black hole exist, and later on they were substantiated with evidence by observation.
This is no different.
Religion merely makes claims, and has no need to substantiate nor prove. Unlike science.
And judging by your comments you know nothing of science.
Empirical claims are probabilistic. All empirical knowledge depends on the persistence of objects (and behaviors, really) in time; i.e., we acknowledge that gravity exists because it is repeatable over a sufficient number of tests for us to draw the conclusion that it will continue to be repeatable into the forseeable future. We really don't have any *reason* to believe that this is the case other than statistical analysis - "It's always been this way."
Thinking outside my Head
Given that they've already posited that mankind's ancestors appeared about 50 million years ago, they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
Huh? Are you confused or just stupid?
And the worst part is you've been modded up as insightful. It's insane. Come on people, visit a goddamn library, or do some googling, or something! This post is total BS, and it doesn't take a genuis to confirm against actual scientific theories that this is total BS.
ummm, no, he's wrong. Read the article, not the headline. The article states the correct 250 million years
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
In order to keep this from happening to us, we need to:
1) Advance as far technologically as we can, as fast as we can, especially in manned space travel.
2) Learn how to survive with a polluted atmosphere, instead of just avoiding polluting it in the first place, which would retard technological growth.
3) Get as many people the hell off this rock as fast as we can. A moonbase would be a great start.
So, if you want the human race to become extinct, vote for John Kerry. If you want us to survive, vote for George Bush.
Thanks for your support.
From Carl Sagan:
... The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.[1] "
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
I always thought the Republican Party was soley responsibile for such environmental and specieist devestation.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
Is Two Billion Years metric for 250 million American years?
I use sidereal time, you insensitive clod!!
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Not necessarily. If you know what one object is and if you know what two objects are, then 1+1=2 becomes an empirical statement. Given one object and another object can you recognize them together as two objects?
Once you start applying a mathematical truth to the real world it starts being empirical. There is nothing inherently axiomatic about 4 sets of 3 objects being the same as 3 sets of 4 objects.
Don't bother - I know _way_ too much (engineer^2) to do anything but laugh at you.
Really.
(I also know a truckload of religious history - I just don't see why you need to mix a mythical "God" into the very sane sayings of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed)
it's in my head
What really gets me is that none of the so called "scientific" origin-of-life theories are logically sound. Nor are they scientific, in the truest sense of the word - their hypotheses cannot be tested.
Of course they can be tested. You can make a hypothesis about how cells form and you can go look for such cells in the fossil record. You can create evolving DNA and RNA strands in a test tube. You can make artificial life forms in the laboratory (this is in progress). There are many clear, simple and easy-to-understand ideas about how life can get started.
Now, instead of four billion years, they've got to explain in it 250 million years. Given that they've already posited that mankind's ancestors appeared about 50 million years ago, they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
No. The extinction killed off most species, but certainly did not reduce life to single cells. Left behind were complex plants, fish, reptiles. Its all there, clearly recorded in the fossil record.
Rather, science often illumines our knowledge of God - we discover the perfection of the Creator in witnessing the beauty of the created.
Apart from the aspects of the 'created' you refuse to look at. Surely its up to God (assuming he exists) to decide how life is created, and unless he is a huge practical joker and trying to fool us, there is overwhelming evidence that evolution is the method.
Thank you! I was about to write something critical of the semi-Kantian analytic/empirical dualism. The idea that some knowledge is "inherent" is absurd. Yes, some definitions lead to other conclusions, but at some point those definitions rest on sensory input of some form. At root everything is in some way abstracted from empirical data. "Three" does not exist but for the experience that objects of some kind exist. Without the concept of differentiating between objects of some sort enumeration is not possible. (The one dimensional universe in Flatland is a fair example of how an undifferentiated space would not allow enumeration. Everything is part of the single inhabitant. Perhaps he could conceive of "one, but "zero" and "two" have no meaning if he fills all available space.)
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
In Soviet Russia, the universe didn't existed at that time. (-2*10E12 years).
For your dining and dancing pleasure, Slashdotters, we have a live, squirming specimen of the bane of the Info Age: "Echd'oh". The website publishes a story (about a 250My-old event), exaggerates the headline (pulling a 2Gy background detail into misrepresenting the entire story), a blogger doesn't RTFA, quotes only the mistaken headline, an irrelevant argument about the incorrect details blooms on the blog. For good measure, a carping blogger invents a neologism to describe the phenomenon, guaranteeing its easy repetition in the blogsphere, even a fad of its own overwhelming the original story, mistake and debate, which are lost in the memory hole.
For our next trick, this thread will pick a different term to describe this phenomenon, which plays on a minor characteristic, spawning mutated copycats trying to fulfill the new term, which will become more popular than the original phenomenon. Behold the mutamemic blogsphere!
--
make install -not war
You seem to be missing the point...
If creationism were true, there would be no evidence at all for evolution. There would be no fossils, no radioactive decay evidence, nothing. That there is pretty convincing evidence for evolution suggests that either:
(1) it actually happened, or
(2) God put it there as some kind of sneaky plan to fool most of us into thinking creationism is ignorant nonsense.
Which of these do you choose?
"The U.S. is falling at warp speed into a dark age of ignorance, superstition and fear."
Only the Great American Heartland ("Praise jeezus, and pass me that rattlesnake!"). The Right and Left Coasts have enough cynnicism and free-thinking left (so to speak) to save it, though.
O.K. I'm an American. I've lived on the East Coast for (oh, roughly) 50 years. What's going on now is what's been going on since the original, intolerant, religious crackpots, er, our Glorious Founding Fathers, came ashore. It's a fight for mindshare.
"Truth" has nothing to do with it. It's all about control. For the past 100 years, one battle has been the Fundies vs. everybody else (the other battle has been Haves vs. Have Nots, but that one is as old as, pardon the expression, Adam).
The fundies are well organized and focused. The "rest of us" free-thinkers are disorganized and unfocused. Hey, if you're a free-thinker, you have a high tolerance for bullshit anyway.
We usually draw the line where evidence is considerable (look up the Scopes trial) or lives hang in the balance (Vietnam).
America is not sliding downhill. It's more like a drunkard's walk into a bad part of town. For goodness' sake, vote people. Vote for Homer Simpson if you have to (mmmm, WMD!), but vote, damnit!
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
I was raised as a Christian and a scientist (not a Christian Scientist however ;>), so your conclusion is inherently flawed at first.
Second, I checked out the site you mention, and not only is it flat wrong about many a lot of factual evidence, it isn't even one of the better creationist sites I've seen. It's one of those "this specious evidence doesn't correlate 100% with the conclusion that the earth is 4.5 bn yrs old, so the earth is really 4000 years old" sites. They ignore an immense amount of evidence that doesn't support them, while focusing on poorly measured, nearly irrelevant information that doesn't even usually support their conclusion. Care to explain carbon and potassium dating, please?
They aren't even correct about their representations about what scientists actually believe about evolution nor creation - such as modern humans evolving from Neanderthals, or "Lucy" being a chimpanzee.
A little advice - taking literal assumptions from a 3000 year old document that's been translated, poorly, many times, isn't a good idea. Try this. http://www.orisol.com/chap08.html
Leading univeristies have proven they can accually stop light, hold it in place, then speed it up on their command.
Well, firstly, that is not in empty space, which as I hope even you believe, is what exists between the stars.
Secondly, if light was stopped for a while, that would mean it took *longer* to get here from the stars, which would mean they were *even older* than millions of years!
For your argument to work, light would need to be speeded up. No-one has done that, of course.
(Also, they aren't really stopping light at all: they are simply storing the information in the light and then re-creating the light later).
The article mentions an interesting theory, that instead of an external meteorite triggering mass eruptions, it might be the volcanic eruptions that came first. The eruptions were powerful enough to fire a great gob of rock into space, and each big crater is where it re-impacted. On this view the eruptions would be the prime cause of the mass extinctions - at Permian, Cretaceous and Triassic - and the impact craters just a side effect.
Assuming Mercury is mostly solid, due to having greater surface-to-volume ratio than Earth, and geologically cooled-off faster than Earth, then if the Caloris impact did that much damage on the far side of Mercury, then on Earth any decently large strike should be able to crack open the crust on the opposite side (remember to take direction of impact into account). That should be enough to let lots of magma pour out, because it does already, whenever the crust splits open, even without a meteor impact. And because of the way impact energy spreads and reconverges on the other side of the globe, a large region of cracks should appear, all letting-loose magma, while the impact site itself is a comparatively small puncture.
when something really big hits something else really fast it tends to break up just a bit
if you notice, the moon has a lot of craters but no bolders sitting in the middle of them
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
The existance of fossils and strata are simply fact. They exist. Various theories about how and when they formed are not necessarly fact. However they do exist, so any theory that does not provide a way for them to exist is wrong. Simple creationist theories of how the earth was formed rely on 'God is a big practical joker who likes to mess with your head' The God of the bible doesn't do stuff like that. (IMHO)
Dating methods are many, and they all agree too well that the earth is old for any reasonable person to question. (barring the practical joker of course) See here for specifics about the trees.
People who say evolution is not true are either ignorant* of the facts, (this can be fixed through study) or they think that an evolving world is incomaptible with the existance of God, (simply not true, but you do have to drop the medievial interpretations of genisis 1 and 2, and other parts of the bible)and they have personal evidence that he exists.
*I am using ignorant to mean 'don't know', not 'stupid' here!
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
What's wrong with magnitude 11?
The Richter scale does not have an end. It measures the energy release of an earthquake on an exponential scale, meaning that a magnitude 5 earthquake is an order of magnitude more energetic than a magnitude 4 earthquake. Hence the usage of the word magnitude.
Is that this damn thing is too old. As is, the Chixilub crater, at 65MY, is severely degraded, and many of the continents were close to their present locations. At the end of the Permian Era, they were all lumped into one land mass.
Even an impact crater as large as 100 miles would be so worn over that even with sensitive geologic data, it would be hard to detect. Finding evidence of shocked quartz points to some sort of impact in that area... narrowing down the date and size is the tough part.
Could this be the smoking gun? Hard to say. My guess is that numerous phenomenon combined to cause this extinction. Massive vulcanism in what is now Siberia would have causes all sorts of problems ecologically. Then you have theories on methane seeps... which could explain why ocean life suffered the worst fate... And maybe this rock was the coup de gras of the Permian Era.... the final nail on the coffin for an already stressed ecosystem.
Though, these extinction events lead life on Earth to its current path. Poor evolutionary pathes were cut off, and only hearty, adaptable species survived.
Haaarumph!! "The Great Dying" indeed!
I don't remember anything so great about it!
Not that the evidence isn't also compatible with creators / designers... but those designers are not only plagarists, but very bad plagarists. Not only have they never surprised us with original code, the copies / plagarism also include copies of all previous copying errors (like the primates having an almost working- but for a few errors- version of vitamin C manufacturing. Yay scurvy: other mammals don't have to worry about it.)
I will NOT use that explanation. Ever. Assuming you are talking about the defense, "God put old fossils there to test us".
So you are saying that if people dig up remains of beings that prove a common ancestor, you will switch your views?
If you find a fossil that proves common ancestry, then yes, I will affirm it. However, just finding a fossil that you think proves common ancestry does not mean it does. First find the proof, then we'll talk.
Using "pure imagination" is a bit far-fetched for someone who bases his claims on superstition.
Who is that? My faith in God is based on what I consider proofs and evidence. You base your belief on naturalism, I'm assuming: "the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations". Since I believe in God (and proof that He exists), I cannot ascribe to naturalism. It's really a simple concept. And without naturalism, Darwinism no longer becomes the simplest answer. It becomes an incredibly convoluted and complex answer.
Have you ever even READ Darwin's works?
Not sure if I should be embarrassed or not. No, I have not - but I don't think that disqualifies me from being able to understand the theory. After all, I have been informed a number of times that Dawwin's works are outdated - and while good for a general understanding, no longer represent the modern Darwinist model. This is usually in response to my mention of some of the many problems with his theory.