This 3-5-metre-deep and 3-5-kilometre-wide trough on the Yucatan Peninsula traces weaknesses in the rock created by the space impactor that many scientists now believe wiped the dinosaurs from the face of the planet.
Don't know if I buy it but its interesting.

This article includes a more persuasive image of the crater.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

"So-called" crater? Are you suggesting that it isn't? It think it's been verified to be an impact crater about as conclusively as any such feature can be.

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Just 5 meters deep? I would think that the impact that wiped a whole species of lifeform on Earth shouls be much larger.

I took the term "so-called" to refer to the name given the crater, not to question whether or not it is a crater.

The crater was much deeper and has been filled in by sediments as the article discusses. This article is actually talking about features resulting from weaknesses created in the rock from the impact. Very interesting!

Working Link to Chicxulub Crater Main Site

__________________
"The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished."

Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz

Yes, I agree. Just the other day I came very close to falling off the edge.

But Slappy also said, "Don't know if I buy it but its interesting."

As Dave said, this impact crater has many features that make it a certainty. There is also evidence it created a tidal wave that went many miles inland around the gulf there. There are a few palentologists who aren't convinced the asteroid caused the dinosaur extinction because many species were decreasing in number before the impact.

I think the argument is much stronger in favor of the asteroid as the cause of missing dinos. The one palentologist you always see on TV that doesn't think the asteroid was the culprit thinks infectious disease may have played a role as species came into contact with other species. But that doesn't fit the germ model because it wouldn't have wiped out so many different species at the same time.

__________________
~~ ><>><> ~~ ><,,> ><,,> ...`;=;p d;=;' /\/\^/\ ^^ ^/\/\_
Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

FWIW The "gulf of Mexico" as such did not exist 65 mya. Most of central North America was covered by the "Great Inland Sea", which stretched up to southern Canada.

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

That's what 65 million years of erosion will do. This one was underwater at the time and is still mostly underwater today; I'm actually surprised that it's survived this well.

I'll take this as a challenge to find a source for geological evidence of the great tsunami from this impact. Give me a day or two. I was guessing the details like how far inland but I remember there was correlating geological evidence for a 'mega-tsunami'.


_________________
Evolution is just a theory. Better fasten your seatbelt, so is gravity.
Beskeptigal.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: beskeptical on 2003-03-14 05:20 ]</font>

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf015/sf015p11.htm

Might be trumped by a decade or two.

__________________
The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I dunno, Gerta Keller has been going after it for a long time. I imagine we could dig up some old articles of hers too.

Hum,
the Iceland impact theory may be correct, but a it seems to me that a `better` explanation is that the magma hotspot that once was under Scotland and formed the Glencoe supervolcano is now under Iceland .
Without any evidence other than the dating of the rock formations and an increase of iridium concentration in northern latitudes it is entertaining speculation.
(of course, it is still possible for an impact to have happen there).

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

Grammatically, it would have been gooder to say, "The crater called Chicxulub..."

__________________
PW -- Plant Whisperer

Hum,
perhaps it would be better to just say "The Chicxulub crater".

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

The Deccan traps (The remains of the massive volcanic event in India) were created round about 65 million years ago and may indeed have had something to do with the demise of the dinosaurs.

I did hear a theory that the traps were in fact created by the chicxulub impact as India at that time would have been at the antipode to the event.

Interesting idea but Im not sure the impactor would have been big enough to create such an event. The Caloris basin on Mercury does have an antipodal structure but it (Caloris) is a huge crater some 1300 km across.

__________________
Beer, the cause of and solution to, all lifes problems

Hum,
interesting idea though.

But easier to just have another impactor - The Shiva crater is a hypothesised impact crater located in the Indian Ocean west of India. It has been suggested that it formed around 65 million years ago, the same time as a number of other impacts that are recorded in the K-T boundary.
The Deccan Traps are located in the theorised centre of the crater, lending support to the idea that the traps were created by the impact event.

Read more

Attached Images

115978759_a965e805e5_o.jpg (27.7 KB, 7 views)

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

I read a Sf book a while back. It was called "Dust" By Charles Pellangro (Excuse spelling cant find it on a quick google) The basis of the book that life is programed by dna to go extinct or close to it every 60 million years or so because the Earth passes through the center of the local galactic arm and is pummeled by comets thrown in by gravitational interaction from the oort cloud and passing stars.

A fairly good read with some nice ideas.

__________________
Beer, the cause of and solution to, all lifes problems

Och!
That's probably nae far awa fae the truth.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002689.html

http://www.wmnh.com/wmgschuw.htm
http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume5/i...s/weinreb.html

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

Oh michty me we're a doomed! Doomed I tell ye!

__________________
Beer, the cause of and solution to, all lifes problems

Don't panic! Don't panic!

We probably still have a few million years left.

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

I've got a couple of comments on this one.

First off, there is very good evidence that at least the impactor responsible for the KT boundary layer (the iridium-rich layer that got the Alvarez's suggesting an impact) happened in the Carribean/Gulf of Mexico (as now described) area. Before the discovery of Chicxulub the search for this crater was already concentrating on that part of the world simply because the boundary layer is so much thicker there. I remember talking to Alan Hildebrand about this in 1990 and he pointed out that the boundary layer in Haiti was a meter thick, as opposed to just a cm over most of the globe. So whatever dumped all that meteoritic soil everywhere, it certainly hit somewhere near there.

Also, back at that time folks were talking about the Deccan Trapps. However, I also knew a number of geologists at Stony Brook who studied the Deccan, and they pointed out that the ages don't quite work for an impact to start it. Simply put, those lavas started up 5 million years before the KT impact, and kept going for another 5 million years after. Unless the dating has been revised in the last decade or so, I would think that makes it unlikely that the KT impactor had much to do with it.

On the other hand, all of that volcanism probably did mean that the global ecosphere was having a hard time of it anyways. I've seen arguments suggesting that the number of large vertebrate species was in serious decline long before the final demise 65 Myrs ago, so possibly the KT impact was just the final blow rather than the sole cause of the mass extinction?

DK

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

That sounds very consistant with things I've heard on both the KT impact and the late-Permian die-off (although the evidence for a big impact is a lot weaker in the Permian).

The other thing we need to keep in mind with both of these big die-offs is just how wide-spread they were: it wasn't just the big species, but everything from bacteria on up that was disappearing at this time.

DK