Slashdot Mirror


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.

19 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Climate change solved! by Calydor · · Score: 4, Funny

    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=-
    1. Re:Climate change solved! by Tranzistors · · Score: 5, Funny

      pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere

      thus solving the problem once and for all!

    2. Re:Climate change solved! by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2

      The Royal Society in the UK did a report on geoengineering and concluded sulphate aerosols for example could be used to effect "a reduction of solar input by about 2%" to "balance the effect on global mean temperature of a doubling of CO2" for "total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars". Check out the Royal Society's report.

      https://royalsociety.org/topic...

      Delivering between 1 and 5 MtS/yr to the stratosphere is feasible. The mass involved is less than a tenth of the current annual payload of the global air transportation, and commercial transport aircraft already reach the lower stratosphere. Methods of delivering the required mass to the stratosphere depend on the required delivery altitude, assuming that the highest required altitude would be that needed to access the lower tropical stratosphere, about 20 km, then the most cost-effective delivery method would probably be a custom built fl eet of aircraft, although rockets, aircraft/rocket combinations, artillery and balloons have all been suggested. Very rough cost estimates based on existing aircraft and artillery technology suggest that costs would be of the order of 3 to 30 $/kg putting the total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars (US National Academy of Science 1992; Keith 2000; Blackstock et al. 2009). The environmental impacts of the delivery system itself would of course also need to be carefully considered.

      I reckon if global warming turns out to be bad, something like this will be done because it's easier to get the Chinese to chip in for it than it is to get them to cripple their economy with steep CO2 emissions cuts. And if the Chinese won't cut CO2 emissions, global CO2 emissions won't come down

      https://photos.mongabay.com/09...

      Another nice thing about this sort of scheme is that you don't need to be able to accurately predict long term climate. You simply need to look at the trend over the last few years and increase or decrease your sulphate pumping rate.

      It's like having a human controlled thermostat for that planet.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    3. Re:Climate change solved! by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

      Just pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract the warming of the carbon dioxide!

      What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!

      Of course, that is very temporary effect anyhow, as the sulfur aerosols will precipitate out as sulfuric acid rain. Yikes!

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    4. Re:Climate change solved! by schnell · · Score: 2

      Don't be duped. Clearly this study was funded by Big Sulphur.

      --
      "95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
  2. OK, solution to global warming found, at last. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Funny
    Let us send some rockets to lasso a good size asteroid and make it hit earth.

    Problem Solved. Where do I collect my consultant fee?

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:OK, solution to global warming found, at last. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Let us send some rockets to lasso a good size asteroid and make it hit earth.

      Problem Solved. Where do I collect my consultant fee?

      You can collect your fee upon completion of the contract.

  3. Asteroid was not an accident! by achacha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Asteroid was not an accident! by CSMoran · · Score: 2

      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?

      Sent by the teapot, no less.

      --
      Every end has half a stick.
    2. Re:Asteroid was not an accident! by Type44Q · · Score: 2

      Why bother with weaponized asteroids if you're going to wait that long?

      Time dilation.

  4. 325 gigatones by edittard · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or roughly 50 billion octaves.

    --
    At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
    1. Re:325 gigatones by yagu · · Score: 2

      you probably should factor in half tones... it's probably more correctly around 30 billion octaves.

    2. Re:325 gigatones by hackertourist · · Score: 3, Funny

      That's almost as many keyboards as Jean Michel Jarre uses in his concerts.

  5. Re:Global freezing for several years eh? by dreamchaser · · Score: 2

    There are actually several species of plant that can grow in freezing temperatures.

  6. Mankind total CO2 emission by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. Scientists: Water is wet. News at 11. by CRB9000 · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Re:And any Geologist. . . . by ljw1004 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    . . . 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.

  9. Re:Floating abstractions by Immerman · · Score: 2

    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.
  10. Re:You entitled asshole by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    That's how capitalism works. If you have more money you "deserve" more stuff.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire