Oil companies are always among the most knowledgeable entities when it comes to geologic reality. Their livelihoods depend upon it.
It is no coincidence that two geologists working for Pemex (the Mexican government’s oil company) postulated the existence of an impact crater in the late 1970’s. Oil company secrecy however prevented public collaboration on the theory until 1990. This is now how we know about the Chicxulub crater.
Exxon-Mobil has publicly declared its acceptance of global warming. This is unsurprising, given the fact that E-M is investing tens of billions of dollars in a joint venture with Russia to drill for oil at the North Pole.
Those who wish to question global warming should look to Exxon-Mobil for guidance. They aren’t investing billions in the Arctic because they think that the world is getting colder. They know that Arctic sea ice is retreating—rapidly—as the earth grows warmer.
Oil companies, and many other businesses, have a grave financial stake in knowing scientific truth. They do not want hack politicians meddling with scientific fact, especially when the meddling may cost them millions or billions to their bottom line.
We do not need Sharpie pens to tell us what is and is not fact. We need careful research, of the type described in this article.
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What I can't figure out is how the sea-based dinosaurs died out but sharks and alligators survived.
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I'd really like to see this article optioned
I'm thinking Alfonso Cuaron
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Nope . The Earth is only 5000 years or thereabouts old
Ha ha, anyway if there is an eternal God , then what is 66 million years to that God ?
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oh come on - "“Almost certainly some of the material would have reached the Moon,” Dr. Gulick said."
Now i'll be the first to admit, I'm not the brightest light in the harbor, but for frick sakes, through some 300 miles plus of atmosphere. this sounds more like a tweet come out of our house on pennsylvania ave.
I mean, I'm open to some fact based rebuke, or some close cousin of such, but to the freeking moon.
I just don't buy it. go ahead, let 'er rip
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@dru
So much energy was created by the impact that it was followed by an explosion that lifted an enormous amount of material (melted rock?) upward into space. This material rained out all around the Earth as with a zillion meteors. Heat from the sky cooked the dinosaurs. Some of the material formed a ring around the Earth and a very small amount likely ended up on the Moon. That is how I understand it.
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@dru
Ha ha , I was wondering about that too. How would this debris shoot up into space, escape Earth's gravitational pull and transit 230,000 miles ? Once in space though, an object can move forever but was the impact pointing directly at the moon ?
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@dru Well, for starters, "300 miles plus of atmosphere" is a bit of a stretch. At the top of Everest, 29028 feet (less than 6 miles) humans taken from sea level quickly to there would be dead of lack of oxygen within an hour or less, probably a lot less. So, 2/3 of the atmosphere is below 6 miles. OK, now this "big rock" impactor is 6 to 9 miles across so if you "placed it" at sea level, its upper edge would already be (mostly) out of the atmosphere, higher than the top of Everest. But it comes screaming into the atmosphere at, at a minimum, Earth's escape velocity, 7 miles per second, and more likely something like or greater than Earth's orbital velocity around the sun, which is a bit more than 18 miles per second. Anyway, Wikipedia says the resulting blast, which likely vaporized the impactor, had an energy of 100 million megatons of TNT. Now, if you think about it, you've got this big "freeking" rock, 6 to 9 miles across, getting vaporized, you're gonna have a blast radius at least as big as the "rock" itself, or at least 6 to 9 miles across, and probably LOTS more. The article says the crater the impactor dug was 20 miles DEEP...so the blast radius is at least 20 miles, well out of 90% of the atmosphere. So, it digs massive amounts of Earth (20 MILES deep!!!) up and blasts something approaching a hemisphere of flying debris out into space. Picture it in your mind's eye--- I see the moon, if it was on the right side of the blast, having a bull's eye painted on it.
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I always wonder how this massive asteroid impact might have altered the earth's orbit? Some even more massive impact in future might possibly alter the orbit in a way that makes it impossible for live to recover.
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Its mass was only about a billionth of earth's mass, so the change in earth's trajectory would have been tiny.
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Sometimes evolution happens in a hurry.
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@Scott It would be better to say "Very slow evolutionary change is not the only kind of change that can happen on and to Earth." Certainly on the day the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs - and many other species - hit Earth, it suddenly became very advantageous to be a small burrowing mammal that could feed on carrion.
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@GRW
I also recall reading that dinosaurs had been dying off for a few million years before the asteroid.
Hopefully someone here can verify this.
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@Scott C N Parkinson , more or less said: Work fills the time allotted to it. Perhaps similarly he would say 'Evolution fills the time allotted to it'
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Was Alabama threatened? Better check with boss before deciding.
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@Tibby Elgato
Bravo !
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Have they recovered any saddles yet?
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The Earth was a very different planet 66 million years ago, at least at the surface. It was much warmer. Sea level was probably twice what is today. The continental landmasses were in different relative locations to each other. Northwest Africa was a short flight from New York. India had yet to collide with Asia.
Dinosaurs and all living organisms of the time had existed in a world of large tectonic shifts, global vulcanism, compositional changes in the atmosphere and oceans and more. Events of the size and nearly instantaneous global impacts like the Chicxulub asteroid are game changers. Overnight the niche a particular organism inhabited was radically altered. Was this the beginning of the end or the final blow for Dinosaurs? I can't say. I can say, "I don't want to live through such a cataclysm."
Humans today seem bent on producing our own slow rolling version of Chicxulub. It won't have the same spectacular punch of an asteroid but the consequences for many lifeforms could be just as devastating.
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@richard wiesner what does it mean that sea level was "twice" what it is today? Twice what? Measured against what? Higher, ok, but twice?
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@richard wiesner "I can say, 'I don't want to live through such a cataclysm.'"
Unlikely you'd be given the choice.
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Humanity's asteroid is coming. It's called Global Heating.
Climate Change.
Sit in your car, with the windows rolled up tight, on a sunny day for a preview of our horrific end.
As you are reading this, greenhouse gasses are rolling up the windows on Planet Earth.
It could have all been prevented.
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@Getreal
We still can mitigate the effects----but it will take political will and a lot of work. It's not over for humanity.....yet.
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@Getreal Global warming is a serious problem. But, as long as we are looking at the past 66 million years, these included three warming anomalies: the Paleozoic-Eocene Thermal Maximum with 1200 ppm CO2; the Miocene Climatic Optimum with 800 ppm C02; the Pliocene with 400 ppm C02. We've turned the clock back to the Pliocene and there is going to be hell to pay even if that's it. The worst we can do is the Paleocene. It will be a huge problem, but not the end of the world or life.
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just goes to show you. one never knows... you wake up in Florida on a pleasant blue-sky morning and then Wham! a 100 ft. tidal wave to deal with, not to mention all that other stuff.
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Ms. Kornei writes that this new research "will yield important scientific knowledge about the day the dinosaurs began to die out."
Not to quibble with this excellent and highly informative article but there is evidence that dinosaurs had already begun to die out, having declined significantly in both numbers and diversity by the time the asteroid struck.
This pre-impact decline can likely be attributed to severe volcanic eruptions -- called the Deccan Traps -- in what is now India.
As an article earlier this year in the magazine Science notes, "Over the course of 1 million years, the greenhouse gases from these eruptions could have raised global temperatures and poisoned the oceans, leaving life in a perilous state before the asteroid impact."
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/did-volcanic-eruptions-help-kill-dinosaurs
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@Richard
Independent cataclysms. No reason to quibble with the article.
11
Although I am not a paleontologist, but an avid follower of the field, I believe that the title of this report, concerning the beginning of the dying of the dinosaurs, is a misnomer. For one thing, dinosaur species came and went throughout the Mesozoic era, roughly a span of 190 million years. Next, I understand that the dinosaur species diminished during the extent of the Cretaceous period; the remaining extensive lineage of the dinosaurs at the time of the asteroid impact was that of the ceratopsians, the "horned lizards" such as Triceratops. In popular literature, and even in some areas of science, little attention is paid to worldwide volcanic eruptions that changed ecosystems, and may have diminished the dinosaurs over th extent of the Cretaceous. While no doubt the asteroid collision caused a worldwide calamity, a hellacious extended period, which indeed most likely ended the reign of the dinosaurs, I think that the dying off of the dinosaurs had preceded the asteroid collision long before.
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"... I believe that the title of this report ... is a misnomer."
Headlines are always misleading. Please suggest a better one.
Note, however, that the article uses the same wording:
"Finding more evidence of the immediate aftermath of the Chicxulub impact will yield important scientific knowledge about the day the dinosaurs began to die out."
11
But not all dinosaur types died out. They’ve evolved into birds. I find the cassowary particularly interesting evolutionarily.
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@Anna
That's what Robert Bakker espoused in his 1986 'Dinosaur Heresies,' including that they were 'warm-blooded' all along and, that there may have been no need for any 'extraterrestrial' cause, but rather - like ourselves - we carry the root-cause to our own extension with us.
4
Certainly, it is not Texas politics that should get credit for this awesome research. The State Education Department is still pushing "intelligent design" into public school textbooks.
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"... it is not Texas politics that should get credit for this awesome research."
Oil money gets the "credit":
"The school’s [Jackson School of Geosciences] formation resulted from one of the most generous gifts in the history of higher education when the late John A. and Katherine G. Jackson bequeathed endowments and assets to the university presently valued at over $300 million." (jsg.utexas.edu/about)
See, also, "Biography: John A. Jackson" at news.utexas.edu:
"... he [Jackson] discovered the great Boonsville [Gas] Field in Wise County, Texas. This success allowed Jackson to form his own company and become its sole owner."
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@Lara Intelligent design in no way contradicts any scientific findings about the planet's origins or evolution. Believing that faith and science are incompatible is a common misunderstanding. The first man to publish the big bang theory was a Jesuit priest named Georges Lemaitre. He published 2 years before Edwin Hubble. His ideas were dismissed as sounding too much like creationism. The existence of God is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
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@Working mom The existence of god is indeed a philosophical question, and it depends on faith. I think Lara’s frustration is that intelligent design (which also depends on faith) posits itself to be a scientific theory.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection works just fine (better actually) without a designer, and if some Christians feel the need to add one, they should do so in Sunday school and not biology class.
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I'm trying to get a visual of this in my head. Undoubtedly it will be the first thing to check out when I invent my time machine. From a distance though.
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@eric
Can I come along? I bring to the table a wealth of speculative wisdom and experience from a lifetime of reading science fiction: Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" and so forth.
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Re:Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"
That's one I seemed to have missed. I'll have to find it
11