
Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs - daegloe
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-discover-new-evidence-of-the-asteroid-that-killed-off-the-dinosaurs-11568055601?mod=rsswn
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anadem
This is another fascinating window on the impact:

[https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-
dea...](https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-deathbed-
linked-to-dinosaur-killing-meteor/)

"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
An article from The New Yorker on the same thing:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-
di...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-
died)

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
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)

------
Causality1
>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%.

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

~~~
makerofspoons
Perhaps you're thinking of Barringer Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater)

------
_Understated_
"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
Between 6.8 and 50 according to wikipedia:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater)

------
hos234
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?

~~~
DCKing
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)

~~~
kittiepryde
If the event didn't occur, dinosaurs may not have all just become birds. The
evolution of the animal eco system would have been very different -- but maybe
still reaching the same result.

~~~
DCKing
> If the event didn't occur, dinosaurs may not have all just become birds.

I'm not trying to suggest that. I'm just saying that we don't know enough, but
that based on the limited things we do know (birds never got to primate level
societal complexity), we can hypothesize that dinosaurs would never have made
it.

It could well be that some other dinosaur subfamily could have taken a turn
towards becoming a complex society, but I wouldn't have bet on the
ankylosaurs, the sauropods or the ornithopods either for this.

------
yters
"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.

~~~
_Understated_
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
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
> 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.

~~~
magduf
Maybe not, but it was still a little bit younger, so there should have been
somewhat more asteroid strikes, even if only by a couple percent.

Moreover, the dinosaurs were around for over 150 million years. Hominids have
been around for only about 2M years, and modern humans only about 200k. They
had loads of time to observe asteroids, realize they're a threat to their
existence, and develop advanced technology and an effective and credible space
program to deal with the threat. But they were just too lazy, or too busy
fighting each other, to bother doing this, and look what the consequences to
them were.

------
HocusLocus
It's time for a plan

[https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...](https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20180227%20David%20L.%20Goldfein%20letter%20SC.pdf)

