6 ms·

Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs

82 points by daegloe 7y ago

yters 7y ago
"Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the single worst day in the history of life on Earth, when a city-sized asteroid smashed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all other life." I wonder if we can learn from that disaster in order to deal with climate change? Seems to be at a similar scale of what may be threatening us.
- mc32 7y ago
  That doesn’t seem right. That thing vaporized Rick, ignited the atmosphere, kicked up massive amounts of earth into the atmosphere and caused huge waves in the oceans (tsunamis isn't even the right word).
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > vaporized Rick Poor Rick :( But yes, it took a while for the climate to go back to normal after that.
    - jmts 7y ago
      His Morty was happier almost instantly though - he was a particularly traumatic Rick, which is saying something!
      - opless 7y ago
        I laughed.
- fhars 7y ago
  Probably not much. What we are currently doing is more similar to the less sudden end-permian extinction, which nonetheless was quite a bit more deadly than the K/Pg extinction with an extinction rate in the 90% range.
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  Not to troll here but I'd be interested in you expanding upon what you mean by this. The reason I say that is the asteroid impact was, by every definition, pure chance in that earth was in the way when it flew through space across our orbital path. (Not wanting to get into a debate about climate change / climate change denial here...) Climate change is something that is happening due to somewhat preventable actions, not chance. I'm curious what you think we could learn from it.
  - magduf 7y ago
    I think the idea is that you should try to prepare for disasters and be able to mitigate them. Basically, the reason most of the dinosaurs went extinct is because they were foolish and short-sighted and didn't bother to develop a serious space program so they could detect, track, and then intercept inbound asteroids. They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc. They ignored all this, so when a really big asteroid came along, they had no way of redirecting it, or even detecting it beforehand. We're not doing much better. We can detect some asteroids, but are we able to intercept and redirect them? No, because we haven't bothered investing much money in a program to develop that capability. Yet we've had plenty of impacts and near-misses. One hit in Russia a few years ago, injuring 1000 people. One flies by pretty frequently, and I think one is supposed to come extremely close this month. Where's the program to intercept these things well ahead of time and redirect them? Climate change isn't that different, except that it isn't just some natural occurrence, it's something we're mostly doing by ourselves. So we're studying it some, we've made predictions about what the effects will be based on evidence from earlier times, yet we absolutely refuse to make any real changes to attempt to avoid this fate. In short, we really aren't much smarter than the dinosaurs.
    - jsweojtj 7y ago
      > They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc. This is a tangential point, but they weren't living in an appreciably younger solar system. 65 million / 4.5 billion is ~1.5%. So, the solar system (and the Earth) was 98.5% of its current age.
anadem 7y ago
This is another fascinating window on the impact: https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-deathbed-linked-to-dinosaur-killing-meteor/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-dea... "the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the K-T boundary" And I've read (can't find the link now) that had the impact happened ten minutes sooner or ten minutes later the effect would have been much less, because the sulfur-bearing rocks wouldn't have been hit thus the climate-changing aerosols would not have been released.
- 5555624 7y ago
  An article from The New Yorker on the same thing: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... The big concern at the time was that nothing about this find had been published in academic publications, just The New Yorker, Fox News, and other news outlets. I haven' heard anything since April.
  - greeneggs 7y ago
    Here's the paper: "A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota" Robert A. DePalma, Jan Smit, David A. Burnham, Klaudia Kuiper, Phillip L. Manning, Anton Oleinik, Peter Larson, Florentin J. Maurrasse, Johan Vellekoop, Mark A. Richards, Loren Gurche, and Walter Alvarez PNAS April 23, 2019 116 (17) 8190-8199 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/17/8190 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/17/8190
  - mmmrtl 7y ago
    Here's the paper: The first day of the Cenozoic Sean P. S. Gulick, Timothy J. Bralower, Jens Ormö, Brendon Hall, Kliti Grice, Bettina Schaefer, Shelby Lyons, Katherine H. Freeman, Joanna V. Morgan, Natalia Artemieva, Pim Kaskes, Sietze J. de Graaff, Michael T. Whalen, Gareth S. Collins, Sonia M. Tikoo, Christina Verhagen, Gail L. Christeson, Philippe Claeys, Marco J. L. Coolen, Steven Goderis, Kazuhisa Goto, Richard A. F. Grieve, Naoma McCall, Gordon R. Osinski, Auriol S. P. Rae, Ulrich Riller, Jan Smit, Vivi Vajda, Axel Wittmann, the Expedition 364 Scientists Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2019, 201909479; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909479116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/04/1909479116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/04/1909479116
HocusLocus 7y ago
It's time for a plan https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20180227%20David%20L.%20Goldfein%20letter%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...
Causality1 7y ago
>wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all other life. The interesting thing about mass extinctions is that they're worse than you imagine from the way scientists commonly phrase it. 75% of species on earth were driven extinct, but that doesn't mean it killed 75% of the trees and bushes and animals and fish. It means it killed every single member of 75% of those species. If you counted the gross number of macroscopic living things before and after, the real portion of them killed was much higher than 75%.
hos234 7y ago
Just wondering...if the dinos had survived, would they have evolved higher intelligence and complex societies or would they be similar to modern reptiles/crocs/turtles and fish(which are as old no?) in terms of intelligence?
- astannard 7y ago
  Well plenty of similar animals that were around at the same time such as Crocodiles have not. Unless crocs reside in our sewers watching, waiting and plotting our downfall
- nikofeyn 7y ago
  maybe? but in my non-expert opinion, probably not. intelligence doesn't seem to be correlated with the age of the species or recent lineage from what i understand. in the water, sharks are extremely old, almost reaching back to the dinosaur ages, but they are wrecked in intelligence by orcas, who came much later. plus, intelligence, or at least the further development of society and technology is solely due to the ability to manipulate objects. for example, i strongly believe that if you took an orca brain and gave it human-like manipulation tools and moved it to land that you would have a homosapiens competitor.
- DCKing 7y ago
  This may sound like nitpicking, but it isn't: the dinos have survived. All birds are dinosaurs. In fact, birds are extremely closely related to the dinosaurs that were long conjectured to have the highest cognitive abilities [1]. Some birds arguably have higher intelligence and form complex societies. But it was the primate group that developed the "most complex" society. This despite the fact that birds like primates are visually oriented, highly vocalized, take extensive care of their young, and many are already adopted to live in complex societies. It could be that the manual dexterity of primates, as well as the mammalian gestation period ('pregnancy') and its ability to have more developed children at birth could be further required factors that led to societies of human complexity. You never know what 65 million years of uninterrupted evolution would have produced, but based on the way birds evolved I don't believe we would have had a dinosaur Hacker News in this alternate history. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodontidae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodontidae
mehmet03 7y ago
50$ https://www.felixo.com/?ref=70757146 https://www.felixo.com/?ref=70757146
_Understated_ 7y ago
"The dinosaur-killing asteroid, estimated to have been up to 50 miles or so across," I thought it was 6 miles across. Have I missed some research on this?
- sjcsjc 7y ago
  Between 6.8 and 50 according to wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
Balanceinfinity 7y ago
For some reason I had thought the impact crater was in the US - perhaps that was a different impact
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  Perhaps you're thinking of Barringer Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

82 points by daegloe 7y ago

"Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the single worst day in the history of life on Earth, when a city-sized asteroid smashed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all other life." I wonder if we can learn from that disaster in order to deal with climate change? Seems to be at a similar scale of what may be threatening us.

mc32 7y ago
That doesn’t seem right. That thing vaporized Rick, ignited the atmosphere, kicked up massive amounts of earth into the atmosphere and caused huge waves in the oceans (tsunamis isn't even the right word).
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > vaporized Rick Poor Rick :( But yes, it took a while for the climate to go back to normal after that.
  - jmts 7y ago
    His Morty was happier almost instantly though - he was a particularly traumatic Rick, which is saying something!
    - opless 7y ago
      I laughed.
fhars 7y ago
Probably not much. What we are currently doing is more similar to the less sudden end-permian extinction, which nonetheless was quite a bit more deadly than the K/Pg extinction with an extinction rate in the 90% range.
_Understated_ 7y ago
Not to troll here but I'd be interested in you expanding upon what you mean by this. The reason I say that is the asteroid impact was, by every definition, pure chance in that earth was in the way when it flew through space across our orbital path. (Not wanting to get into a debate about climate change / climate change denial here...) Climate change is something that is happening due to somewhat preventable actions, not chance. I'm curious what you think we could learn from it.
- magduf 7y ago
  I think the idea is that you should try to prepare for disasters and be able to mitigate them. Basically, the reason most of the dinosaurs went extinct is because they were foolish and short-sighted and didn't bother to develop a serious space program so they could detect, track, and then intercept inbound asteroids. They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc. They ignored all this, so when a really big asteroid came along, they had no way of redirecting it, or even detecting it beforehand. We're not doing much better. We can detect some asteroids, but are we able to intercept and redirect them? No, because we haven't bothered investing much money in a program to develop that capability. Yet we've had plenty of impacts and near-misses. One hit in Russia a few years ago, injuring 1000 people. One flies by pretty frequently, and I think one is supposed to come extremely close this month. Where's the program to intercept these things well ahead of time and redirect them? Climate change isn't that different, except that it isn't just some natural occurrence, it's something we're mostly doing by ourselves. So we're studying it some, we've made predictions about what the effects will be based on evidence from earlier times, yet we absolutely refuse to make any real changes to attempt to avoid this fate. In short, we really aren't much smarter than the dinosaurs.
  - jsweojtj 7y ago
    > They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc. This is a tangential point, but they weren't living in an appreciably younger solar system. 65 million / 4.5 billion is ~1.5%. So, the solar system (and the Earth) was 98.5% of its current age.

anadem 7y ago

This is another fascinating window on the impact: https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-deathbed-linked-to-dinosaur-killing-meteor/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-dea... "the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the K-T boundary" And I've read (can't find the link now) that had the impact happened ten minutes sooner or ten minutes later the effect would have been much less, because the sulfur-bearing rocks wouldn't have been hit thus the climate-changing aerosols would not have been released.

5555624 7y ago
An article from The New Yorker on the same thing: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... The big concern at the time was that nothing about this find had been published in academic publications, just The New Yorker, Fox News, and other news outlets. I haven' heard anything since April.
- greeneggs 7y ago
  Here's the paper: "A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota" Robert A. DePalma, Jan Smit, David A. Burnham, Klaudia Kuiper, Phillip L. Manning, Anton Oleinik, Peter Larson, Florentin J. Maurrasse, Johan Vellekoop, Mark A. Richards, Loren Gurche, and Walter Alvarez PNAS April 23, 2019 116 (17) 8190-8199 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/17/8190 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/17/8190
- mmmrtl 7y ago
  Here's the paper: The first day of the Cenozoic Sean P. S. Gulick, Timothy J. Bralower, Jens Ormö, Brendon Hall, Kliti Grice, Bettina Schaefer, Shelby Lyons, Katherine H. Freeman, Joanna V. Morgan, Natalia Artemieva, Pim Kaskes, Sietze J. de Graaff, Michael T. Whalen, Gareth S. Collins, Sonia M. Tikoo, Christina Verhagen, Gail L. Christeson, Philippe Claeys, Marco J. L. Coolen, Steven Goderis, Kazuhisa Goto, Richard A. F. Grieve, Naoma McCall, Gordon R. Osinski, Auriol S. P. Rae, Ulrich Riller, Jan Smit, Vivi Vajda, Axel Wittmann, the Expedition 364 Scientists Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2019, 201909479; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909479116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/04/1909479116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/04/1909479116

HocusLocus 7y ago

It's time for a plan https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20180227%20David%20L.%20Goldfein%20letter%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...

Causality1 7y ago

>wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all other life. The interesting thing about mass extinctions is that they're worse than you imagine from the way scientists commonly phrase it. 75% of species on earth were driven extinct, but that doesn't mean it killed 75% of the trees and bushes and animals and fish. It means it killed every single member of 75% of those species. If you counted the gross number of macroscopic living things before and after, the real portion of them killed was much higher than 75%.

hos234 7y ago

Just wondering...if the dinos had survived, would they have evolved higher intelligence and complex societies or would they be similar to modern reptiles/crocs/turtles and fish(which are as old no?) in terms of intelligence?

astannard 7y ago
Well plenty of similar animals that were around at the same time such as Crocodiles have not. Unless crocs reside in our sewers watching, waiting and plotting our downfall
nikofeyn 7y ago
maybe? but in my non-expert opinion, probably not. intelligence doesn't seem to be correlated with the age of the species or recent lineage from what i understand. in the water, sharks are extremely old, almost reaching back to the dinosaur ages, but they are wrecked in intelligence by orcas, who came much later. plus, intelligence, or at least the further development of society and technology is solely due to the ability to manipulate objects. for example, i strongly believe that if you took an orca brain and gave it human-like manipulation tools and moved it to land that you would have a homosapiens competitor.
DCKing 7y ago
This may sound like nitpicking, but it isn't: the dinos have survived. All birds are dinosaurs. In fact, birds are extremely closely related to the dinosaurs that were long conjectured to have the highest cognitive abilities [1]. Some birds arguably have higher intelligence and form complex societies. But it was the primate group that developed the "most complex" society. This despite the fact that birds like primates are visually oriented, highly vocalized, take extensive care of their young, and many are already adopted to live in complex societies. It could be that the manual dexterity of primates, as well as the mammalian gestation period ('pregnancy') and its ability to have more developed children at birth could be further required factors that led to societies of human complexity. You never know what 65 million years of uninterrupted evolution would have produced, but based on the way birds evolved I don't believe we would have had a dinosaur Hacker News in this alternate history. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodontidae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodontidae

mehmet03 7y ago

50$ https://www.felixo.com/?ref=70757146 https://www.felixo.com/?ref=70757146

_Understated_ 7y ago

"The dinosaur-killing asteroid, estimated to have been up to 50 miles or so across," I thought it was 6 miles across. Have I missed some research on this?

sjcsjc 7y ago
Between 6.8 and 50 according to wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

Balanceinfinity 7y ago

For some reason I had thought the impact crater was in the US - perhaps that was a different impact

makerofspoons 7y ago
Perhaps you're thinking of Barringer Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater