Dinosaur Extinction New Questions

by Lewis Loflin

Many scientists claim a bolide impact in the Mexican Yucatan 65-million years ago killed the dinosaurs, but new evidence says otherwise: multiple impacts plus the eruptions of the Deccan Traps in India together doomed the dinosaurs. 70 percent of all life on earth died at this time.

Sankar Chatterjee a Texas Tech paleontologist named this the Shiva strike after the Hindu god of death. The event blasted a 300-mile wide crater on the floor of the Indian Ocean he has been studying since the 1990s. The impact may have broken off part of India to form the Seychelles Islands. There is controversy over the Shiva strike causing the Deccan Traps eruptions.

This bolide was estimated to be 15-25 miles wide and blasted it's way into the mantel exposing molten material to the Indian Ocean 300,000 years after the Yucatan strike. Billions of tons of seawater would be flashed boiled into steam in a column hundreds of miles across.

Read more: India Asteroid Killed Dinosaurs, Made Largest Crater? by Ker Than National Geographic News October 16, 2009.

Permian Extinction 252 Million Years Ago Caused by Meteor Impact

"About 252 million years ago, more than 96 percent of ocean life and 70 percent of land-based life forms died in an event known as the end-Permian extinction. The mass die-off happened in a geologic flash of just 60,000 years. Scientists have proposed everything from massive meteor impacts to coal explosions to rifting supercontinents to explain this cataclysmic extinction."

Most try to blame this on climate change caused by CO2 in relation to the eruptions of the Siberian Traps where lava flows covered an area the size of the continental US. Even bacteria feeding off gases spewed from the eruptions was blamed. But new evidence from a study at Ohio State University disputes this.

A 200-mile-wide "plug" of mantel material has been found under a mile of ice in Antarctica in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica south of Australia. This is believed to be caused by a meteor 30 miles wide.

NASA's GRACE satellites measure gravity fluctuations and found a 200-mile wide plug of mantel material. When the images were overlaid with radar images to peer through the ice it fit into "a circular ridge 300 miles wide." This structure could hold the entire state of Ohio.

Antarctica at this time was near where Australia is today. Massive amounts of sulfur, CO2, chlorine, etc. along with ejecta (burning rock thrown across the Earth) would have generated massive world wide fires and a deluge of caustic rain killing ocean life. The Earth would have been dark for months or even years and toxic ash and rain would have nearly killed life on land as well.

Research is ongoing. Read more at: http://reserchnews.osu.edu/archive/erthboom.htm.