That's not the only problem. Most of the world didn't have significant volcanism before, during, or after the impact. The areas that did have volcanism - say one eruption every 1,000 years, per volcano - carried on with that at with a barely detectable difference. Much the same for earthquakes - only those areas prone to earthquakes before the event had earthquakes, and within a few thousand years (probably) after the impact even the area around the impact would have settled down within a millennium or two. (It would have been pretty wild for the first few hundred years though!)
The are proposing that this strike didn't have any secondary effects - such as volcanoes, earthquakes and the like?
No, they're not. They're saying that some of the main effects which have previously been attributed to this impact actually occurred before the impact. Therefore the main effects are not things that were caused by the impact. Minor things (huge earthquakes ; mega tsunami ; hundred-metre thick rains of red-hot glass spherules) were limited to the Caribbean basin and surrounding areas (up to Canada, probably down to Paraguay, possibly well into Africa), and these minor effects are not a matter of dispute at all.
IMO... such a LARGE impact would have ramifications for MANY years to come.
You've missed out a factor of 100,000 or so. The evidence from the ground is that it took several millions of years for the biological diversity of the planet to return to pre-impact levels (and then with a changed cast of dinosaurs, increased mammals, and a severely changed marine microflora and somewhat changed invertebrate fauna).
Well, it is thought we've found all the dinosaur-killer-size asteroids,
That's sort-of true for asteroids. Astronomers think that they've found around 90% of the expected population of Earth-crossing multi-kilometre Main Belt asteroids. But if the models are wrong, or we're looking at a non-Main Belt asteroid... then that 90% figure doesn't hold. (And 90% found still leaves 10% un-found.)
However, an impactor coming in on a cometary (Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud aphelion) orbit is another matter. Considerably higher impact velocities and therefore energy ; considerably shorter warning times - down to a few weeks, easily if you remember Hyakutake ; no good idea of a mass distribution. It's an open book.
While we're living in one ecosystem, we're vulnerable at the species or kingdom level. It'd take a lot to eradicate the single-celled organisms, but plants and animals are much more vulnerable.
biostatigraphy and high resolution geochronology [show] that the impact event took place between 100-150 ky BEFORE the KT mass-die off that defines the K-T boundary
The last time I read one of Keller's papers while the ink was still damp, she was pushing for around 60~75 kyr between Chicxulub and K-Pg, with around 200kyr between the start of the Deccan and Chicxulub. Which is a real triumph of differential geochronology on a global scale - error bars of around 0.1% of value for two events which are reasonably close to antipodal.
I've never found the antipodal argument convincing.
It has never been convincing energetically.
The improvements in dating over the last decade or so have killed it dead. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to join the Choir Immortal etc etc. It is an ex-hypothesis.
While the hypothesis laid out before us may never have been called "beautiful", it was at least a respectable. And here it is - laid low not by one ugly fact, but a swarm of fact-flechettes tearing it to shreds. Alas, poor Yorick-the-antipodal-eruption hypothesis. I knew him, Horatio. Poor sod never stood a chance.
Unfortunately, the process that formed the Deccan was the process that led to the separation of the Indian plate from the African plate.
As part of that process, extension of the area before separation led to the tilting of substantial fault blocks as well as the transport of mudrocks to considerable depths and temperatures, where they cooked to produce hydrocarbons (oil and gas) which then migrated upwards into traps formed in the tilted fault blocks.
Which might just possibly give a hint as to why the area has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the last few years. When I first worked there, there wasn't an offset well log for 500km in one direction and 2500km in the other direction ; now there are about 6 major drilling programmes working the play, churning out a couple of new wells a month.
Yeah exactly, which came first? The pallet is virtually useless without the fork.
I would suspect the fork - as an adjunct to the portable crane. It is still very standard practice to move items of machinery around in the workspace by picking them up between the tines of a fork lift. Some fork tines have a hole pierced in the tip of each tine for looping soft rope or a chain through. And I've seen load spreaders and specialised barrel lifts which work in essentially the same way as a set of fork lifts still in use on construction sites. I suspect that the crane modifications came first - as many factory floors have a crane of some or several sorts, and they can use the same adaptors - and the pallet then co-evolved with that.
When I first started working on industrial sites in the latest 1970s there were still several different sizes of pallet in use, and from certain advertising (e.g. for vans : "our bed is wide enough for a EuroNorm pallet") I suspect that there are still several nearly interchangeable sizes still in use. (The EuroNorm is TTBOMK 1m in dimension with a few cm handling leeway on either side. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a USian pallet is one Edwards-nose-fingertip (three Roman feet or a "yard") on edge. That's a nearly 30% difference in volume.
We still have to worry about astroblemes. A repeat of (for an example) the Chicxulub impact would certainly devastate the Western hemisphere. Think of tsunami washing [I forget the name - range of hills along the north edge of Texas. Ozarks?] as kilos of red hot debris falls on every 10 sq.m of the hemisphere, with the subsequent conflagration.
It might not be a species-ending event for Homo sapiens, but that would be due to our wide geographic range and the presence of locally abundant stores of both food and information. It might well be a civilisation ending event, or at least put us back to around the Renaissance. Fairly big deal.
If it had happened a mere 14 kyr ago, it could have extinguished pretty much the whole of the human race. Or at least, if it took out the appropriate area, wiped out agriculture for a few millennia. (14kyr BP is the approximate date of the Barringer crater.)
And yet you participate in the corporate - consumerist love-fest by using telecommunications, electronics, and electricity. But since you don't want the responsibility of change, you probably don't vote.
However, the hypothesis that a major astrobleme is necessary to trigger a Large Igneous Province at the impact's antipode does not have strong support. (Possibly it has no significant support - we have a very incomplete impact record.)
The hypothesis (implicit, but never as far as I know proposed by a serious scientist) that a Large Igneous Province (LIP) is incapable of causing enough global environmental stress to cause a mass extinction is not proven. LIPs come in many sizes, and since they tend to bury their early phases under their later phases, it is very hard to measure their actual durations and eruption rates.
The hypothesis that a large astrobleme is sufficient to cause a global mass extinction has not been proven. In fact, the classical case - the K-Pg or Chicxulub impact - itself shows an inconsistent story. Some dinosaurs died out (large ones) but small dinosaurs survived and are now the most species rich group of tetrapods (birds). Some free-floating plankton families died out (damn, where's a biostratigrapher when you need one?) and other, closely related families didn't. Some plant families died out, and others didn't.
Contrary to what "popular science" programmes will tell you, the pattern of extinctions at the K-Pg extinction seems almost random. Which suggests that the Chixulub impactor was not, in itself, sufficient to take out all of a group of life forms.
Possibly, to get a mass extinction, you need to combine a LIP (which is happening around 1/10th to 1/5th of the time) with another "point event" (impact [K-Pg], methane-clathrate destabilisation [Pg-Eo], ocean sulphate chemistry fuck-up [Palaeozoic-Mesozoic], or another impact [Manicouagan + 2 others in a chain, Triassic-Jurassic]). It isn't a simple story. But it's more likely to not be incorrect than the simple story.
From the article: "The researchers suggest that the Deccan Traps eruptions and the meteorite impact near present-day Chicxulub, Mexico, need to be considered together when studying and modeling the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event."
The researchers are NOT implying support for the "antipodal eruption model". the sequence of events is wrong for that theory to be true, without the existence of backwards-in-time time travel.
The scenario they are suggesting (which Keller has been banging on for a couple of decades) is that the environmental stresses due to the Deccan eruptions were damaging environments, stressing individuals and populations, damaging ecologies, and generally making life hard. Then there's a major impact at Chicxulub which makes a bad situation worse.
[In true Slashdot style, I'll admit to not having RTFA - but unusually, it's because I have been watching the evidence for this build up over 20+ years. Contrary to what producers at Discovery channel (other poor quality popular science producers are available) express, there has never been unanimity over the Chicxulub-killed-the-dinosaurs theory within the industry.]
[now I've RTFA - no surprises - it's exactly what I expected, having been following this debate for 20+ years.]
Now, where is the crater that formed the Siberian traps [wikipedia.org]. And, did it end the Permian period?
Do you have a thought-through reason for assuming that no major series of eruptions, centred on a small area in space and time, can occur without a preceding antipodal major impact?
Please note my comment above : the start of the Deccan Traps happened several hundred thousand years before the Chicxulub impact. If you're really, really serious about asserting that the Chicxulub impact caused the Deccan Traps, then you have a tremendous career ahead (and behind) you in the new physics of bidirectional time travel.
I'd be more inclined to believe we don't have our dating methods perfected quite yet.
Our dating methods are not by any means perfect. The best dating so far puts the start of the Deccan around 200,000 years before the Chicxulub impact, +/- 65,000 years. That's about 3-sigma, or significant at around the 1% level. There is about a 1% chance that the null hypothesis (the Deccan and Chicxulub events were contemporaneous, or the the Deccan occurred after the Chicxulub impact) is true and that this dating result is an error.
This is not new news ; Keller has been pushing this for a couple of decades now, and as the dates have gradually been tightened (for both Chicxulub and for the start of the Deccan), the answer has become clearer : Deccan before Chicxulub. (Others have been pushing at the question for even longer than Keller, but she's been the most persistent doubter. And as such has performed a hugely valued task of forcing people to prove their statements - and they've been found wanting.
In future decades, people will look back at this and put it in the text books with Wegener as a good example of an erroneous paradigm being pushed back against and defeated over a period of decades.
This may revive the theory that the Deccan traps were formed at the antipode of a major eruption - the seismic waves will focus there, and could crack the Earth's crust (for a really big impact).
Neglecting your typo of "eruption" for "impact", no ; this kills it as dead as a very dead thing(*).
the Deccan Traps, which were once three times larger than France, began its main phase of eruptions roughly 250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, extinction event
Gerta Keller (the Princeton-based researcher who has been banging this particular drum for a couple of decades now - to evident success) gets the Chicxulub impact at 60-80,000 before the K-Pg extinction event, iridium spike, base surges tsunamiites, etc, which would put the Deccan staring around 170,000 to 190,000 years before the K-Pg faunal changes. That is like suggesting that our actions today could be responsible for the demise of Homo erectus and the ascendancy of Homo sapiens.
(*) As a geologist, I'm uncomfortable about describing something as "stone dead" : stones are full of life, with fascinating detailed histories. Not dead at all.
If our main goal is to reproduce and spread among the galaxy,
There's an important word in your comment : the first one. "If". It may be your primary aim in life, but I'm completely content to not reproduce. Since we've no evidence of intelligent life anywhere else in the universe (and precious little down here on Earth), we do have an obligation to the future to spread life in general until we discover that someone else has been or is doing the same, in order to reduce the odds of life becoming extinct. But personal reproduction - who needs that?
Mostly the name, and a whithering contempt for pretension and snootiness. so [whatever the name of the scriptwriter] decided to poke fun at a friend by casting his nickname into the body of a near complete antithesis.
Like I said, I don't know the programme itself ; I can't stand the oiliness of the loathsome main character for more than a few seconds before I feel the temptation to put boot to face. Spending a week on the hill with the original is by contrast a pleasure.
There's probably a word for "demonstrating by counter-example", but I can't think of it at the moment.
... I have to get the wife's permission. She chose it for me as a birthday present, and it ticks enough tech boxes that she plainly did think think about it. Solar powered doesn't work so well in winter here in the high latitudes - sleeve blocks the rare sunlight, and lamp light too. Radio-controlled, tied to UTC with whatever offsets I choose. Non-conductive strap so it can be worn on the worksite. Replacing the watch is not something that is going to happen on a whim.
See other comments - if it's a "clean room", then I can't imagine how bare skin would be allowed. And for no small number of jobs, memory devices are forbidden in the workplace. So, [shrug] not a problem I'm likely to face.
Yeah, I noticed that dichotomy too. A clean room that allows skin flakes, hair, pocket cruft? Doesn't add up.
Or they have a place called the "clean room", with lots of gongs and whistles to impress visiting customers... and bugger-all procedure to back up the "clean theatre"
What if you don't commute using a car, you use a motorbike or bicycle instead. Lot's of times I have put off going home until the rain let up a bit or stopped.
Which is a reasonably valid point.
However, unless your facility is going to be standing idle for 8 or 16 hours of each day (and however many days at weekends and this time of year), then you are going to be relieved at your workstation or the change room by your relief (as you relieved them, or the 3rd shift ; possibly even a 4th shift, but that's pretty rare). You'll do your hand-over, they sign off on the information you pass over... and then you can check your weather and decide whether to hang around, unpaid, until the weather improves.
Also, of course, assuming that you're allowed to loiter excessively on the premises after your shift has finished. Not all companies will allow that.
Solar and sidereal time. [...] A true smartwatch would provide both in addition to time based on UTC.
You absolutely also need an output for Mars time. The hoards of workers living on Mars time (seriously - a couple of dozen in the JPL operations centre) need that extra 37 minutes per day (if I recall correctly). A Google employee who tweets as "@MarsRoverDriver" because that used to be his job, has an app (though ISTR that it's an iApp only).
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the only problem. Most of the world didn't have significant volcanism before, during, or after the impact. The areas that did have volcanism - say one eruption every 1,000 years, per volcano - carried on with that at with a barely detectable difference. Much the same for earthquakes - only those areas prone to earthquakes before the event had earthquakes, and within a few thousand years (probably) after the impact even the area around the impact would have settled down within a millennium or two. (It would have been pretty wild for the first few hundred years though!)
No, they're not. They're saying that some of the main effects which have previously been attributed to this impact actually occurred before the impact. Therefore the main effects are not things that were caused by the impact. Minor things (huge earthquakes ; mega tsunami ; hundred-metre thick rains of red-hot glass spherules) were limited to the Caribbean basin and surrounding areas (up to Canada, probably down to Paraguay, possibly well into Africa), and these minor effects are not a matter of dispute at all.
You've missed out a factor of 100,000 or so. The evidence from the ground is that it took several millions of years for the biological diversity of the planet to return to pre-impact levels (and then with a changed cast of dinosaurs, increased mammals, and a severely changed marine microflora and somewhat changed invertebrate fauna).
It does say that.
That's sort-of true for asteroids. Astronomers think that they've found around 90% of the expected population of Earth-crossing multi-kilometre Main Belt asteroids. But if the models are wrong, or we're looking at a non-Main Belt asteroid ... then that 90% figure doesn't hold. (And 90% found still leaves 10% un-found.)
However, an impactor coming in on a cometary (Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud aphelion) orbit is another matter. Considerably higher impact velocities and therefore energy ; considerably shorter warning times - down to a few weeks, easily if you remember Hyakutake ; no good idea of a mass distribution. It's an open book.
While we're living in one ecosystem, we're vulnerable at the species or kingdom level. It'd take a lot to eradicate the single-celled organisms, but plants and animals are much more vulnerable.
The last time I read one of Keller's papers while the ink was still damp, she was pushing for around 60~75 kyr between Chicxulub and K-Pg, with around 200kyr between the start of the Deccan and Chicxulub. Which is a real triumph of differential geochronology on a global scale - error bars of around 0.1% of value for two events which are reasonably close to antipodal.
It has never been convincing energetically.
The improvements in dating over the last decade or so have killed it dead. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to join the Choir Immortal etc etc. It is an ex-hypothesis.
While the hypothesis laid out before us may never have been called "beautiful", it was at least a respectable. And here it is - laid low not by one ugly fact, but a swarm of fact-flechettes tearing it to shreds. Alas, poor Yorick-the-antipodal-eruption hypothesis. I knew him, Horatio. Poor sod never stood a chance.
As part of that process, extension of the area before separation led to the tilting of substantial fault blocks as well as the transport of mudrocks to considerable depths and temperatures, where they cooked to produce hydrocarbons (oil and gas) which then migrated upwards into traps formed in the tilted fault blocks.
Which might just possibly give a hint as to why the area has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the last few years. When I first worked there, there wasn't an offset well log for 500km in one direction and 2500km in the other direction ; now there are about 6 major drilling programmes working the play, churning out a couple of new wells a month.
I would suspect the fork - as an adjunct to the portable crane. It is still very standard practice to move items of machinery around in the workspace by picking them up between the tines of a fork lift. Some fork tines have a hole pierced in the tip of each tine for looping soft rope or a chain through. And I've seen load spreaders and specialised barrel lifts which work in essentially the same way as a set of fork lifts still in use on construction sites. I suspect that the crane modifications came first - as many factory floors have a crane of some or several sorts, and they can use the same adaptors - and the pallet then co-evolved with that.
When I first started working on industrial sites in the latest 1970s there were still several different sizes of pallet in use, and from certain advertising (e.g. for vans : "our bed is wide enough for a EuroNorm pallet") I suspect that there are still several nearly interchangeable sizes still in use. (The EuroNorm is TTBOMK 1m in dimension with a few cm handling leeway on either side. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a USian pallet is one Edwards-nose-fingertip (three Roman feet or a "yard") on edge. That's a nearly 30% difference in volume.
We still have to worry about astroblemes. A repeat of (for an example) the Chicxulub impact would certainly devastate the Western hemisphere. Think of tsunami washing [I forget the name - range of hills along the north edge of Texas. Ozarks?] as kilos of red hot debris falls on every 10 sq.m of the hemisphere, with the subsequent conflagration.
It might not be a species-ending event for Homo sapiens, but that would be due to our wide geographic range and the presence of locally abundant stores of both food and information. It might well be a civilisation ending event, or at least put us back to around the Renaissance. Fairly big deal.
If it had happened a mere 14 kyr ago, it could have extinguished pretty much the whole of the human race. Or at least, if it took out the appropriate area, wiped out agriculture for a few millennia. (14kyr BP is the approximate date of the Barringer crater.)
And yet you participate in the corporate - consumerist love-fest by using telecommunications, electronics, and electricity. But since you don't want the responsibility of change, you probably don't vote.
However, the hypothesis that a major astrobleme is necessary to trigger a Large Igneous Province at the impact's antipode does not have strong support. (Possibly it has no significant support - we have a very incomplete impact record.)
The hypothesis (implicit, but never as far as I know proposed by a serious scientist) that a Large Igneous Province (LIP) is incapable of causing enough global environmental stress to cause a mass extinction is not proven. LIPs come in many sizes, and since they tend to bury their early phases under their later phases, it is very hard to measure their actual durations and eruption rates.
The hypothesis that a large astrobleme is sufficient to cause a global mass extinction has not been proven. In fact, the classical case - the K-Pg or Chicxulub impact - itself shows an inconsistent story. Some dinosaurs died out (large ones) but small dinosaurs survived and are now the most species rich group of tetrapods (birds). Some free-floating plankton families died out (damn, where's a biostratigrapher when you need one?) and other, closely related families didn't. Some plant families died out, and others didn't.
Contrary to what "popular science" programmes will tell you, the pattern of extinctions at the K-Pg extinction seems almost random. Which suggests that the Chixulub impactor was not, in itself, sufficient to take out all of a group of life forms.
Possibly, to get a mass extinction, you need to combine a LIP (which is happening around 1/10th to 1/5th of the time) with another "point event" (impact [K-Pg], methane-clathrate destabilisation [Pg-Eo], ocean sulphate chemistry fuck-up [Palaeozoic-Mesozoic], or another impact [Manicouagan + 2 others in a chain, Triassic-Jurassic]). It isn't a simple story. But it's more likely to not be incorrect than the simple story.
The researchers are NOT implying support for the "antipodal eruption model". the sequence of events is wrong for that theory to be true, without the existence of backwards-in-time time travel.
The scenario they are suggesting (which Keller has been banging on for a couple of decades) is that the environmental stresses due to the Deccan eruptions were damaging environments, stressing individuals and populations, damaging ecologies, and generally making life hard. Then there's a major impact at Chicxulub which makes a bad situation worse.
[In true Slashdot style, I'll admit to not having RTFA - but unusually, it's because I have been watching the evidence for this build up over 20+ years. Contrary to what producers at Discovery channel (other poor quality popular science producers are available) express, there has never been unanimity over the Chicxulub-killed-the-dinosaurs theory within the industry.]
[now I've RTFA - no surprises - it's exactly what I expected, having been following this debate for 20+ years.]
I turn it off before I come onto Slashdot, since this is meant to be a news site, not a comedy forum.
Do you have a thought-through reason for assuming that no major series of eruptions, centred on a small area in space and time, can occur without a preceding antipodal major impact?
Please note my comment above : the start of the Deccan Traps happened several hundred thousand years before the Chicxulub impact. If you're really, really serious about asserting that the Chicxulub impact caused the Deccan Traps, then you have a tremendous career ahead (and behind) you in the new physics of bidirectional time travel.
Our dating methods are not by any means perfect. The best dating so far puts the start of the Deccan around 200,000 years before the Chicxulub impact, +/- 65,000 years. That's about 3-sigma, or significant at around the 1% level. There is about a 1% chance that the null hypothesis (the Deccan and Chicxulub events were contemporaneous, or the the Deccan occurred after the Chicxulub impact) is true and that this dating result is an error.
This is not new news ; Keller has been pushing this for a couple of decades now, and as the dates have gradually been tightened (for both Chicxulub and for the start of the Deccan), the answer has become clearer : Deccan before Chicxulub. (Others have been pushing at the question for even longer than Keller, but she's been the most persistent doubter. And as such has performed a hugely valued task of forcing people to prove their statements - and they've been found wanting.
In future decades, people will look back at this and put it in the text books with Wegener as a good example of an erroneous paradigm being pushed back against and defeated over a period of decades.
Neglecting your typo of "eruption" for "impact", no ; this kills it as dead as a very dead thing(*).
Gerta Keller (the Princeton-based researcher who has been banging this particular drum for a couple of decades now - to evident success) gets the Chicxulub impact at 60-80,000 before the K-Pg extinction event, iridium spike, base surges tsunamiites, etc, which would put the Deccan staring around 170,000 to 190,000 years before the K-Pg faunal changes. That is like suggesting that our actions today could be responsible for the demise of Homo erectus and the ascendancy of Homo sapiens.
(*) As a geologist, I'm uncomfortable about describing something as "stone dead" : stones are full of life, with fascinating detailed histories. Not dead at all.
There's an important word in your comment : the first one. "If". It may be your primary aim in life, but I'm completely content to not reproduce. Since we've no evidence of intelligent life anywhere else in the universe (and precious little down here on Earth), we do have an obligation to the future to spread life in general until we discover that someone else has been or is doing the same, in order to reduce the odds of life becoming extinct. But personal reproduction - who needs that?
Go, PETA!
Like I said, I don't know the programme itself ; I can't stand the oiliness of the loathsome main character for more than a few seconds before I feel the temptation to put boot to face. Spending a week on the hill with the original is by contrast a pleasure.
There's probably a word for "demonstrating by counter-example", but I can't think of it at the moment.
At least most of them are niggers, who might otherwise get uppity and out of their place. Boy!
[racist thug stereotypes rolled out for emphasis of the Reason That Dare Not Speak It's Name.]
See other comments - if it's a "clean room", then I can't imagine how bare skin would be allowed. And for no small number of jobs, memory devices are forbidden in the workplace. So, [shrug] not a problem I'm likely to face.
Or they have a place called the "clean room", with lots of gongs and whistles to impress visiting customers ... and bugger-all procedure to back up the "clean theatre"
Which is a reasonably valid point.
However, unless your facility is going to be standing idle for 8 or 16 hours of each day (and however many days at weekends and this time of year), then you are going to be relieved at your workstation or the change room by your relief (as you relieved them, or the 3rd shift ; possibly even a 4th shift, but that's pretty rare). You'll do your hand-over, they sign off on the information you pass over ... and then you can check your weather and decide whether to hang around, unpaid, until the weather improves.
Also, of course, assuming that you're allowed to loiter excessively on the premises after your shift has finished. Not all companies will allow that.
One man's noise is another man's measurement and a third man's calibration.
You absolutely also need an output for Mars time. The hoards of workers living on Mars time (seriously - a couple of dozen in the JPL operations centre) need that extra 37 minutes per day (if I recall correctly). A Google employee who tweets as "@MarsRoverDriver" because that used to be his job, has an app (though ISTR that it's an iApp only).