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Scientists To Drill Into 'Ground Zero' of the Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won't be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater — the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the 180-kilometer-wide crater rim, scientists hope to settle ideas about how such 'peak rings,' hallmarks of the largest impact craters, take shape.
If the drill samples turn out to be a green or black sludge that seems to move by itself, toss it back down the hole and pour in a bunch of concrete.
Everyone should know that by now.
How do we know it wasn't an alien extremophile virus? Don't drill!
Consequence of the human desire for simple answers.
It is annoying here. The "event" was at least three events and took place over an extended time period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If they turn into the Koopa Towers, then we definitely have a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
A note: The statistics of fossil preservation indicate that the incidence of fossil dinosaurs will drop in advance of the cataclysm that destroyed them all... but this doesn't indicate that life was already waning.
It can be both.
Many years ago I participated in a paleontological expedition led by the late Dr. Keith Rigby, of Notre Dame. His research was developing a dinosaur species database by stratigraphy in Montana's Hell Creek formation, and his data showed that as you approach the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, you see more dinosaur species that have what appear to be anatomical adaptations for higher temperatures. Above the K-T boundary of course you find no dinosaur remains. This would support a scenario in which the dinosaurs were already under adaptation pressures due to climate change, then were finished off by the asteroid strike.
A couple of cool things. In the Montana badlands you can actually see the K-T boundary in the stratigraphy; it's a chocolatey brown horizontal band about the width of your hand. I also got to help Dr. Rigby reconstruct a triceratops skull -- which is to say I got to hold his tools while he did the actual work. He pointed out how the frill was richly supplied with blood vessels. You could see the impressions on the surface of the frill, and the frill itself was well-supplied with blood vessels and was almost spongelike in appearance. The suborder Ceratopsia emerged at the end of the Cretaceous; if their frills functioned primarily as heat exchangers that would support Rigby's hypothesis.
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I'd guess they're doing this sort of research so they can learn more and either help to prove or disprove that particular theory. But unless the archaeological winds have changed while I wasn't paying attention, isn't that still the leading theory?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The P-T extinction isn't what the drilling is trying to study. The Chicxulub crater is believed to be responsible for the K-Pg extinction event.
Actually, as the dominant species they had privilege at that point, and were brought down by a coalition of minority species, lead by the long oppressed mammals. The mammals convinced the dinosaurs that there needed to be fewer negative (or at least problematic) representations of mammals in contemporary video games.
The changes that were made to video games to fit in with the mammalists caused the dominance of dinosaurs to disappear. Now they're reduced to a bunch of feathered flying rats, who occasionally take a (white) crap on mammal society, but are otherwise harmless.
You're right posted the wrong link there
http://www.britannica.com/scie...
if they discover it's got a depleted uranium core
It seems there is a LOT more energy underground than can ever be accounted for by rotted biological products. I mean are we really driving around in our cars with dinosaurs "off gasses?" I feel a lot of the energy was slammed underground before it could explode and buried deep for our energy companies to rape us. Thanks Exxon
They gonna drill down there and put a parking fine under my wiper?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
I wouldn't brag about that parking job. You burned off a huge chunk of your ship's iridium hull before plowing into the planet...
I think the temperature late Cretaceous was falling, not rising. There's substantial evidence of a general species decline (marine at least) for the 10m years preceding the KT event.
With respect to Rigby's hypothesis, there are so many variables to consider it's very hard to conclude anything from the presence of blood vessels in the frill.
Surely more than a few science fiction novels have started like this.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Well, that's the thing about science is that there's always contradictory evidence. My experience is with more modern environmental data, and one thing it's taught me is to always remember that you're looking at a sample, which may not be representative. This is even more the case when you're looking at data points from 66 million years ago. It's not easy to conclusively say whether temperature were rising, falling, or both at the same time but in different places.
Science doesn't advance by individuals discovering the Truth; it advances by individuals latching on to tiny facets of the Truth and having a fight about whose facet is the whole Truth. All sides tend to be wrong initially.
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The dinosaurs were riding around on a farm cart?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
While no-one (creation-cretins and Expanding-Earthers excepted) seriously doubts the K-Pg extinctions, the Deccan traps, or the Chixulub impactor, getting the precise relative dating of the three events (at least two of which were likely extended over decades to hundreds of thousands of years), is still a matter for debate and acquisition of evidence.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Yes, there was an impactor. Around (i.e. both before and after) the same time, there was major volcanism. And how either would have seriously affected some marine orders but not others remains unclear.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"