Fifty years ago, we were mostly just guessing or speculating about what caused the Younger Dryas or any other mass extinction. Not any more. These days we have lots of ice cores that allow people to find and date and distinguish between the impact of comets/asteroids vs volcanic events. We're much better at finding the relevant areas that will show the relevant soil layers. We know that a massive volcanic event produces high sulfur dioxide in the ice core samples laid down at the relevant time but impact events dont. We know that structures like shocked quartz and nano-diamonds are produced only by meteor/comet impacts or nuclear bombs. When we find a layer of sediment all over the entire earth that is full of shocked quartz, nano-diamonds, and ash, we know as fact at this point that something really big hit the earth. But it takes a lot of work by a lot of people before you have all the necessary data showing that there was a layer with the shocked quartz etc laid down at the right time. We cant yet tell the difference between impacts from comets or meters.
Well, there go my GPS devices
Somethings can be stated with certainty, like climate changes. Simply because of geologic processes (plate tectonics, geologic uplift, and so forth, climate will change.
First, it appears you are asking for geologic evidence of a modern event which won't exist yet.
Consider this, World War 2 was cataclysmic, but since then we US, USSR, France and others have detonated, in the open, atomic and hydrogen bombs that individually had greater explosive power than all the bombs dropped in WW2.
I would accept any evidence, not necessarily geologic.
And you'll note that I never said I was giving up my gas-guzzler, my Weber, my fire table, my home heater/AC or my Boomsticks. This is a speculative intellectual exercise that will or won't become fact in 12 (Per AOC
) to 1,000 years or more.Precisely, my dear Watson
Thanks for clarifying.And you'll note that I never said I was giving up my gas-guzzler, my Weber, my fire table, my home heater/AC or my Boomsticks. This is a speculative intellectual exercise that will or won't become fact in 12 (Per AOC
That's the Chicxulub crater, Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Thats the KT mass extintion, the most recent and best-known one, the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That fits everything you mentioned except it was not a "previously unknown extinction event." I was learning about the extinction of the dinosaurs when I was 8, more than six decades ago. It was very old news then. The discovery of the role of the crater is more recent, though. (Even though its 93 miles across, its eroded and is 2/3 under water.) It wasnt obvious it was a crater. Lois and Walter Alvarez published their paper identifying and dating the iridium layer in soils to the time of extinction of the dinosaurs and proposed that an impact with an iridium-rich asteroid is what caused the KT extinction. That was the year after I moved to Oregon. Very exciting. I bought the theory from that first paper. It was wildly controversial for at least a decade as more and more studies accumulated. But where was the crater? At that point, oil geologists got permission to reveal data they had on the underwater part of the crater, and it became the obvious candidate. It turned out to date to the right time and the iridium layer was the deepest the closer you were to the crater.I recently watched a very interesting Youtube vid on an asteroid hit off the coast of Mexico millions of years ago. I don't remember all of what they said... but the gist was that there was a previously unknown extinction event caused by the impact. They said they analysed the rocks and deep sediment layers inside a huge offshore crater. The resulting data showed that the impact created a flash fire in the atmosphere and also the vegetation for many miles around the impact. Then there was a tsunami. The wave put out the fires and the receding surge drew much of the debris back into the crater. Most of life on earth was extinguished by the blockng of the sun afterwards.
Things that make ya go.... hmmmmmmm!
The rest of this discussion is pretty "Art Bell".
