Geologists Find Clues In Crater Left By Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/06/476871766/geologists-find-clues-in-crater-left-by-dinosaur-killing-asteroid

by hoffmannesque • 10 years ago

83 24 10 years ago

npr.org

sandworm101• 10 years ago

Title error because of old science. The asteroid killed off lots of things, but dinos were already on the way out. Maybe next year things will swing back, but atm the rock wasn't to blame.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/18/dinosaurs-in...

"...a huge tsunami that was triggered when the asteroid struck."

I think we need a different word for that scale of wave.

laumars• 10 years ago

"a new study suggests" != "new science"

As good as it is to have new papers on the topic, let's not fall into the pop-science trap of thinking every new research will "cure cancer", "change our entire understanding of physics" and all the other premature comments that people make.

Retric• 10 years ago

This may be an artifact of how sparse the fossil record is. If something was around for 0.5m years it's far less likely to be seen than something around for 5m years. Combined with the facts that smaller animals evolve faster, and efficient body-types are preserved. EX: Sharks.

moogly• 10 years ago

It's called "megatsunami".

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

Dinos were not on the way out. That reading comes from a misinterpretation of the fossil record and bad statistics. Some species are represented near the extinction event; some are not found except in layers some time before the event. This is in fact the expected distribution with normal sampling. Since the record is fragmentary, and some species are hard to find in any event, its normal to not find them all exactly at the boundary between pre- and post-event.

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

The scale of this event really does boggle the mind.

pdwetz• 10 years ago

The novel Seveneves brings a similar (actually, far worse) event in a modern environment. Both a fun and nightmarish thought exercise.

intrasight• 10 years ago

I immediately thought of Seveneves as well. You know some time thousands of years in the future, the Earth's humaniods are going to ask how their ancestors survived the asteroid in our future.

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

Oh, never even heard of it, and just snagged it. Thanks!

akkartik• 10 years ago

This animation shows the land basically behaving like a liquid in response to the impact: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub-animation....

lisper2• 10 years ago

"I think it was a bad few months, really," Morgan says.

Actually, there's quite a bit of evidence that the dinos were wiped out in a matter of days, if not hours. The ejecta from the impact was launched out into space on sub-orbital trajectories. When it fell back, it heated the atmosphere and turned the whole planet into a giant convection oven.

http://www3.nd.edu/~cneal/CRN_Papers/Schulte10_Sci_Chicxulub...

mrfusion• 10 years ago

How did birds and mammals survive?

lisper2• 10 years ago

Under ground and in caves.

elcct• 10 years ago

Birds are dinosaurs

trhway• 10 years ago

It were small mole kind of mammals in their ground holes. Something like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat - this one has very low metabolic rate for example.

yeukhon2• 10 years ago

Presumably they lived far far away.

aminok• 10 years ago

Here's my amateur scientific paper on the proximal cause of the dinosaur extinction, and why birds and mammals survived:

http://amincd.tumblr.com/post/5690584281/oxygen-deprivation-...

oliv__• 10 years ago

Pardon my ignorance but I don't exactly get how dinosaurs were wiped out of the earth by one asteroid.

Were all the dinosaurs located in the same small area? Or did the remaining dinos die from the subsequent winter?

tommoor• 10 years ago

Very simple and quick explanation as far as I remember it - the large dinosaurs that survived the initial impact were wiped out by the ensuing 'winter' and lack of food (they needed a lot to sustain themselves). Plenty of smaller creatures survived including types of dinosaurs that evolved into birds.

Happy to be corrected :)

Gibbon1• 10 years ago

I remember maybe fifteen years ago seeing a crude animation of the surface temperature around the globe in the hours after the impact. The material ejected from the crater reenters to atmosphere and fries everything under it.

Another comment I read from a geologist is you see lots of periods where various animals go extinct. But in this case whole clades of plants went extinct. That you don't see.

adrianmacneil• 10 years ago

I think this pretty much sums it up...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU1QPtOZQZU

yeukhon2• 10 years ago

https://youtu.be/vuet3t9geXo?t=11m59s

Start with this.

The size of the asteroid they thought would be the size of Staten Island, NY. The impact would generate a huge shock wave and high temapture, fire everywhere, so killing animals nearby (say 100 miles) within minutes.

Tsunami came next and wiped out everything nearby hundreds of miles+. The smoke and dust covering the air (think of volcano) so sunlight cannot enter Earth so there was a long cold winter, killing even more animals.

colin_fraizer• 10 years ago

Is it possible that it wasn't an asteroid at all, but just a Tesla Model S?

Geologists Find Clues In Crater Left By Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid

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