Study Provides Compelling Evidence of Single Impact Extinction Theory

ectotherm writes to tell us that a new study at the University of Missouri-Columbia claims to provide compelling evidence that a single meteor impact was the cause of animal extinction 65 million years ago. From the article: "MacLeod and his co-investigators studied sediment recovered from the Demerara Rise in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of South America, about 4,500 km (approximately 2,800 miles) from the impact site on the Yucatan Peninsula. Sites closer to and farther from the impact site have been studied, but few intermediary sites such as this have been explored."

Comments

65 million?

[grub]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

Re:65 million?

[sRev]

I read this yesterday and have been looking in occasionally to read the comments at the bottom. It looks like there must be some global creationist group that is directing traffic to the story, as every comment makes just that same arguement. I guess the creationist party line is that the "flood" wiped out the dinosaurs. That's a lot of water.

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Young Earth Creationists say that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, they're talking in God-years.

Re:65 million?

[morgan_greywolf]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

Read through the comments at the bottom. Seriously. These people really believe this stuff, and I've personally met people who, if you try to talk to them about almost anything scientific (like, oh say, 80,000-year-old human remains) will absolutely tell you "No, way! The Earth is only 6,000 years ago. It says so in the Bible!"

I'm not at all suggesting that people give up their religious convictions, but I am saying that some people need to stop confusing religion with science. They are separate disciplines and need to be separate. If you absolutely must believe that the choice is eaither A) God loves me and the Earth is only 6,000 years or B) there was a mass extinction event on the Earth 65 million years ago, so there can't be a God, then you are either seriously depraved or downright stupid.

Re:65 million?

[ettlz]

Ever wondered what god the dinosaurs fought wars and slaughtered each other in the name of?

Jehovasaurus.

Next!

Re:65 million?

[flynt]

So you have no problem granting me equal logical standing when I say the following: that I have, as of this moment, created your entire reality. Isn't it possible that if I was the creator, and created the universe, then I could also have created that universe with a false history? You believe me don't you? I have a post that says it's true! All other posts were planted here by me to tempt the faithless.

The problem with the statement is that there is no way to challenge it. You can't prove it, I can't disprove it, at best it's uninteresting, and at worst it's meaningless.

Re:65 million?

[wall0159]

>> equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life
The theory of evolution is not a theory regarding the origin of life.

>> The Monkeyists might like to know
I presume you're trying to imply that people are thought to be descended from monkeys. This is not what evolution states.

>> there hase to be NO CHANGE in the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12
This is true. In fact, the ratio has not been constant. A quick look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating shows that scientists are aware of this. (who would have thunk it?)
So, is the ratio constant historically? No. Does that make carbon dating useless? No.

>> I do expect at least 5 posts arguing against what I say
That'd be because what you say is factually incorrect and misleading.

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan]

"They are only biased in the same way that a jury might be made biased upon seeing an overwhelming amount of evidence. They have reached their conclusions based on the large amount of compelling evidence, what have you reached your upon?"

I base mine on a compelling amount of evidence. What is your evidence?

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

Old argument. Could He create a stone He couldn't lift?

I heard answers like: sure He could, after that He could improve His might so He could lift it (or eat the burrito).

Funny as hell.

Thruth is: if there is a God, He is definitely not omnipotent. Most people talk about a Almighty God, which, in strict sense, means "One with all might". That doesn't mean He "can do everything", it means He can do anything every other being can, and perhaps a lot more (like creating a universe with an embedded existance, which I personally believe to be bogus).

Back to the "creation" thing: I'm christian. I believe God created the Universe, the earth and all living and non-living beings. That doesn't mean he created the world in six literal days, nor does it mean that "it just happened" as he wished. He could have initiated everything and guided it since then.

Bottomline is: when you mix up science and religion, you degrade the value of both. The question of the scientific origin of "us" shouldn't be hampered with religious prejudice, nor should the question of religious origin be hampered with scientific prejudice. In the end, it's up to the individual to combine both beliefs into one.

What both ends always should realize: everything you say which you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt is a theory. At this point in time, macro-evolution seems the more likely theory. For others, Intelligent Design could seem the most likely. But these questions should always be regarded as a theory, not as facts, and should be considered from a scientific point of view, instead of a religious one. It's apparent that most creationists forget that rule, but to me it's also apparent that a bunch of evolutionists forget it: it almost is a sport to degrade monotheists with scientific theories.

I call BS

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Look at the film. You can see another meteor on the grassy knoll.

MacLeod?

[rainer_d]

Hell, he's probably witnessed it himself.

How it really happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

65 million years ago...

Dino 1: Wii is the best dino console.
Dino 2: No. The Wii graphics suck. Xbox 360 is awesome.
Dino 3: Wii and Xbox 360 both suck. Playstation 3 with Cell processor rules. Plus we have BluRay.
Dino 1: PS3 is too expensive and there aren't enough blue diodes. All dinosaurs can afford Wii though. It great!
Dino 2: Meh, PS3 is expensive and Wii doesn't do hidef. Xbox 360 sits right in the middle and saves the day. Go 360, go!

God: Ok, that does it. No more dinosaurs.

Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[MROD]

The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.

Around the K-T boundery there is not only the Chixalub impact but a large one in Germany and a couple of others which have been discovered, all within the dating error. Add to this that there's also the Decan Traps flood basalts being errupted, ocean currents changing as the north atlantic starts to open and the amount of flooded continental shelf decreasing hugely and you have several possible smoking guns.

The evidence just isn't there currently to say why most of the dinosaur lineages died out (along with many sea reptiles and other oceanic creatures). In fact there is still a doubt as to when it actually happened and over how long a period. Ammonites, it seems, saw the meteorite coming.. about a million years before it hit.

Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[flyingsquid]

The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.

This is really misleading- there may be other craters out there, but there is certainly nothing else out there like Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater is one of the largest meteorite craters ever discovered; vastly larger than anything we've ever seen in human history or anything that's happened in the past 65 million years. The rock or comet responsible for it is thought to have been about 10km in diameter, travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour; in terms of energy released by that blast, we're talking about something that would have made a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and USSR look like a couple of kids playing with fireworks. It is estimated that a Chicxulub-scale impact occurs on the order of once every 100 million years, if that often.

The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, meanwhile is one of the five largest mass extinctions to occur in the past half-billion years. In other words, a 1-in-100 million year event. What are the odds of two such large scale, exceptionally rare events occurring simultaneously? Pretty much nil. True, there may be a few scientists out there who debate whether the K-T extinction was caused by the Chicxulub, and they try to poke holes in the Alvarez extinction hypothesis. But they haven't been able to present a compelling alternative to it.

Finally, ammonites go right up to the K-T boundary. In a paper in PNAS, Pope et al. show stratigraphic ranges of ammonites; the majority of ammonites extend to within a few tens of thousands of years of the K-T boundary and many go extinct right at the boundary.

oblig Bill Hicks

[BitterAndDrunk]

'Sure.' Dinosaurs? ..... 'God put those there to test our faith.'
I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. You believe that?
'Uh huh.'
Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their heads?
God's running around, burying fossils: 'Hu hu ho. We'll see who believes in me now, ha HA. I'm a prankster god. I am killing me. Ho ho ho ho.'
You know, you die, you go to St. Peter, 'Did you you believe in dinosaurs?'
Well, you know, there was fossils everywhere. [Bill makes sound effects with his mic] KOOM Aaaahhhh. 'What are you, an idiot? God was FUCKING with you! Giant flying lizards, you moron! That's one of God's easiest jokes!'
'It seemed so plausibleeeee! Ahhhhhhhh!' Bound for the lake of fire. . . . "

We miss you Bill . . . please tell the flying saucers to drop you off for another show.

Weird

[pagaboy]

40 responses and not a single noodly appendage in sight. Is everyone OK?

Metaphysics

[CustomDesigned]

A false history is a metaphysical concept. Any scientific investigation would see the "false" history. Indeed, the "false" history is the true physical history seen by honest scientists - except when viewed from outside the system. There is no sense even bringing it up in a scientific discussion.

An analogy would be a computer simulation. You have a gigantic computer simulating a universe. You don't want to run the simulation from the big bang, so you load a precomputed state which includes 14 billion years already simulated. Now, this is important to know for discussions of the reality in which the giant computer exists. But it is meaningless for any discussion or investigation of the simulation rules for the universe being simulated.

BTW, your simulation has a "cheat" function called "miracle" used for, ah, errr, "debugging". The AI units in your simulation can't reliably tell which events are miracles, and which are normal operation of the simulation. This is because they cannot know the full state of the simulation, and likely won't even know the full rule set - due to being part of the simulation themselves.