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Study Provides Compelling Evidence of Single Impact Extinction Theory

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the scientists-all-looking-for-someone-named-ele dept.

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."

9 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. 65 million? by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


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

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:65 million? by sRev · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:65 million? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    3. Re:65 million? by ettlz · · Score: 5, Funny
      Ever wondered what god the dinosaurs fought wars and slaughtered each other in the name of?

      Jehovasaurus.

      Next!

    4. Re:65 million? by wall0159 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >> 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.

  2. I call BS by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  3. How it really happened... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Weird by pagaboy · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation by flyingsquid · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.