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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.
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/...
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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...