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The Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Plunged Earth Into Catastrophic Winter (bbc.com)
The asteroid impact roughly 66 million years ago that wiped out three-quarters of plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs, dropped temperatures globally below freezing for several years. The new assessment, reported in the journal Geographic Research Letters, gives scientists a much clearer picture of the climate catastrophe following the event. BCC reports: The UK geophysicist was the co-lead investigator on the 2016 project to drill into what remains of the impactor's crater under the Gulf of Mexico. She and colleagues spent several weeks retrieving the rock samples that would allow them to reconstruct precisely how the Earth reacted to being punched by a high-velocity space object. Their study suggests the asteroid approached the surface from the north-east, striking what was then a shallow sea at an oblique angle of 60 degrees. Roughly 12km wide and moving at about 18km/s, the stony impactor instantly excavated and vaporized thousands of billions of tonnes of rock. This material included a lot of sulphur-containing minerals such as gypsum and anhydrite, but also carbonates which yielded carbon dioxide. The team's calculations estimate the quantities ejected upwards at high speed into the upper atmosphere included 325 gigatones of sulphur (give or take 130Gt) and perhaps 425Gt of carbon dioxide (plus or minus 160Gt). The CO2 would eventually have a longer-term warming effect, but the release of so much sulphur, combined with soot and dust, would have had an immediate and very severe cooling effect.
Just pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract the warming of the carbon dioxide!
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Problem Solved. Where do I collect my consultant fee?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yep. Filed under "stuff we knew over 40 years ago", only now it happened "roughly 66 million years ago" instead of the usually stated "65 million years ago".
And people wonder why Trump doesn't have much interest in funding scientific research...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
That's probably a coincidence we're talking about that subject, but rumor has it that a slightly smaller asteroid is going to crash very soon exactly in the center of North Korea
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
In a How & Why Wonder Book?
Seriously, the post-ELE meteoric winter is something I knew about as kid back in '79.
Just sayin'.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The climate is going to change with or without human help so it would be better to figure out how to roll with it than to fight it.
How do we know it wasn't a weaponized asteroid intended to clearing and terraforming this planet for the new human species to evolve and be monitored?
We could do with another, to counteract global warming.
Releasing sulfer into the atmosphere?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Or roughly 50 billion octaves.
At the bottom of the
There are actually several species of plant that can grow in freezing temperatures.
Ironically, that particular snark got old here on Slashdot about 6000 years ago.
Here you go.
But we don't know the exact asteroid, what it came from, etc. Which would be equivalent to solving the murder. What we know is the bullet type used (roughly from the entrance and exit wounds), how long it took to kill, and what happened immediately afterward.
"Catastrophe" is meaningless without teleology (some way the universe is "supposed to go"), and teleology is meaningless without theism.
A whole lot of species died. Other species didn't. Wouldn't matter which, then or now with "climate change". Per naturalistic evolution, case closed, no basis for a value judgment about it.
Well I think it's safe to say it was fucking catastrophic if you were a dinosaur.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
How many Gt of CO2 and S have we human released into the air, since the industry revolution?
As for CO2: according to Wikipedia, around 380 Gigatonnes of carbon in the 1901-2013 timespan. Or just under 1400 Gigatonnes of CO2. So this meteor strike would have put ~1/3 of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in a single event, of what mankind has produced throughout its industrial age.
Note that the source referenced by Wikipedia only seems to have per-year totals (estimates, obviously). So I'm guessing that 380 GtC number was arrived at by adding up the annual figures.
Earth is only 6000 years old.
That's only the flat part. The rest has been proven to be older.
I've done some research of my own. Well, I read back issues of National Geographic:
There was this guy, way back, I think it was before WWII and he flew all by himself to somewhere like in Europe. Maybe it was even further like in France.
Did you know there was a guy he was an actor and he liked killed a President?
You can't keep your eyes open when you sneeze.
You can't touch your nose with your elbow, unless like you are in a car accident, like my friend becky. She's really messed up.
If you hit the earth with a big enough rock it will kill like almost all of the dinosaurs, except like the ones that ended up in Jurassic Park and then because all of the stuff that goes in the air it will be like winter like even in the summer and you can't get a refund from your vacation cause it snowed in Cabo but then like a really long time later like at least a thousand years some guy says that it happened and like he wasn't even the first guy to think of it because like you know the indians that lived when it happened already knew it, but then some other guy like BeauHD puts it on the web like even on Slashdot because even like Reddit wont put it up.
I'm going to watch TMZ now.
Wouldn't that be trillions of tonnes? I think they should have used 'thousands of thousands of thousands of thousands', I mean who could possibly comprehend a number as big as a trillion.
. . . could have told you that. Heck. the K/T Event has a distinct signature in any rock column, and its' characterization. . . in the 1980s. . . led to the TTAPS paper, better known as the "Nuclear Winter" paper. This is 35+ year-old "news". . .
I suppose that we have to figure that some may not have heard about it. Its like the endless turkey cooking tips that get repeated every year around Thanksgiving time.
But yeah, geologists and climatologists have used a lot of information stored in the earth such as how certain minerals form, radiodecay, Ice cores, and other indicators to form climate over time data with pretty fair confidence.
There are some mysteries of course, like "snowball earth" which is a hypothesis that the whole earth was covered with ice at one point, used to explain how some minerals at tropical latitudes formed that require very cold temps to form. But that's a hypothsis and a detail in the overall story.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
. . . could have told you that. Heck. the K/T Event has a distinct signature in any rock column, and its' characterization. . . in the 1980s. . . led to the TTAPS paper, better known as the "Nuclear Winter" paper. This is 35+ year-old "news". . .
As TFS says, "The new assessment gives scientists a much clearer picture of the climate catastrophe following the event."
I'm not sure what your point is? Everyone knows what happened. This is a piece of scientific research. It deepens our understanding of the event a little, adds more data-points, tightens some variables, gets corroborating evidence from a different (more direct) technique.
As far as I can tell with a quick google search, no vascular plant grows below 0C. And biomass growth below 5C is minimal. So this is not correct, unless you mean algae or something like it.
Moritz
catastrophe
ktastrf/
noun: catastrophe; plural noun: catastrophes
an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster.
Nothing about where the universe is "supposed to go", just damage and suffering.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So, to reverse the effects of Climate change all we have to do is arrange for an asteroid impact!
Cool. I'll sign you up as volunteering for the maximum suffering package then?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And we "know" what killed the dinosaurs in detail
No, we don't. We think we know what the major causes were. We know that dinosaurs were on the decline before this event as warm blooded mammals became bigger and more plentiful, and that they were pretty much gone after the event.
Many bugs, plants, seeds and spores can remain frozen but alive for a long time; some animals too (e.g. frogs). There are a couple of reptile species still alive today that could be considered dinosaurs if we wanted to classify them as such. Plus birds (which are really just dinosaurs with feathers) survived.
That is 32,705 "Christianities"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That's how capitalism works. If you have more money you "deserve" more stuff.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm sure we have enough impending catastrophes to give you all your chance on the front lines. I'd hate for anyone to miss out on such a wonderful opportunity to put your philosophy to use.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Reality is fundamentally unknowable, even science only attempts successive approximations. Philosophy is how you interpret what you think you know.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.