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posted by martyb on Friday November 10 2017, @03:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the Thunder-Lizard-met-its-match dept.

The Chicxulub impact event is credited with causing the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. Now, a study in Nature suggests that dinosaurs could have survived if the asteroid had landed in an ocean or almost any bit of land that wasn't loaded with hydrocarbons:

[...] the extraterrestrial impact happened nearly anywhere else, like in the ocean or in the middle of most continents, some scientists now say it is possible dinosaurs could have survived annihilation. Only 13 percent of the Earth's surface harbored the ingredients necessary to turn the cosmic collision into this specific mass extinction event, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-14199-x] [DX]. "I think dinosaurs could still be alive today," if the asteroid had landed elsewhere, Kunio Kaiho, a paleontologist from Tohoku University in Japan and lead author on the study, said in an email.

Other researchers questioned their findings.

When the asteroid, which had a diameter about half the length of Manhattan, struck the coast of Mexico, it found a rich source of sulfur and hydrocarbons, or organic deposits like fossil fuels, according to the researchers. Scorching hot temperatures at the impact crater would have ignited the fuel. The combustion would have spewed soot and sulfur into the stratosphere in sufficient quantities to blot out the sun and change the climate, setting into motion the collapse of entire ecosystems and the extinction of three-quarters of all species on Earth.

[...] Eighty-seven percent of Earth's surface, places like most of present day India, China, the Amazon and Africa, would not have had high enough concentrations of hydrocarbons to seal the dinosaurs' fate. But if the asteroid had hit marine coastal areas thriving with algae, which would have included present day Siberia, the Middle East and the eastern coast of North America, the bang would have been about as devastating to the dinosaurs and life on Earth as the Chicxulub impact.

Humans should burn off all of the hydrocarbons and tar sands in the Earth's crust, so we can make our species more resistant to impactors.

Also at DW, The Atlantic, and Live Science.

Related: Asteroid Impact That Killed Off the Dinosaurs Quantified


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 10 2017, @08:58PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday November 10 2017, @08:58PM (#595343)

    Interesting, but remember, every single prior civilization that humans have created has collapsed. It seems a bit optimistic to think that this one won't.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 11 2017, @03:15AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 11 2017, @03:15AM (#595470) Journal
    Several such civilizations have already collapsed in living memory such as the Ottoman Empire, the USSR, and the Qing dynasty. Didn't disrupt things that much. Collapse of larger systems is more what you're thinking.

    There, we have several examples such as the collapse or decline of several Eurasian civilizations in the 5th and 6th century AD (including the famous fall of the Western Roman Empire), the Late Bronze Age Collapse, or prehistoric human troubles such as the hypothesized near extinction of Cro Magnon man in 75,000 BC or the extinction of Homo Neanderthalus about 40,000 BC. The first two had the symptoms that traditionally are associated with modern depictions of social collapse such as high numbers and movement of dispossessed, destruction of most infrastructure, and permanent disruption of existing trade networks.

    My view is that we're not close to such a collapse. IMHO, such collapses require either a suitably large disaster or evolution of fragile societies. The fragility of modern societies is greatly exaggerated and one can deliberately instill disruptions to keep them that way (for example, economic disruptions via recessions and mass bankruptcies).