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Re: News: Did Gas Fires Kill Dinosaurs?
- To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com
- Subject: Re: News: Did Gas Fires Kill Dinosaurs?
- From: "E.P. Grondine" <epgrondine@yahoo.com>
- Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1999 08:41:06 -0800 (PST)
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- Resent-Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1999 11:41:41 -0500 (EST)
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Hello Lou and everybody -
This headline strikes me as being a pretty poor
choice of words. Of course, "Did a large cometary
impact kill the dinosaurs by releasing large amounts
of methane which ignited?" won't fit in one line.
The explosion of the methane could not have added but
a few more megatons to what was already a gigaton
event, but the combustion itself may go some way
towards explaining why the sole survivors of the K/T
event were burrowing animals and birds.
It strikes me that the piece's writer estimated
that the public is so bored with hearing about the
impact which killed the dinosaurs that he decided that
if he wanted anyone to read his piece he would have to
run it with a misleading teaser.
EP
--- Louis Varricchio <varricch@aero.und.edu> wrote:
> BBC News, 11/18/99
>
> Fiery end for dinosaurs?
>
> Scientists believe the entire
> atmosphere may have burned
>
> The dinosaurs may have been wiped out
> in a gas-fuelled
> firestorm, according to a new theory.
>
> A "hell on Earth" may have been
> triggered by vast
> quantities of trapped methane released
> from under the
> ground by a comet.
>
>
> A massive impact in the
> Gulf of
> Mexico 65 million years
> ago is
> thought to have changed
> the Earth's
> climate and driven the
> dinosaurs to
> extinction.
>
> But a team of American oceanographers
> believe this is
> only half the story.
>
> They say the dinosaurs' end may have
> been even more
> dramatic, as shock waves from the
> explosion released
> highly flammable methane from within
> the Earth.
>
>
> At the end of the
> Cretaceous
> period huge amounts
> of the
> gas, generated by
> rotting
> vegetation, lay
> trapped in
> sediments 500
> metres below
> sea level.
>
> Bubbling up to the
> surface,
> the methane would
> have
> escaped into the
> air and
> been ignited by
> lightning
> bursts in the
> disturbed
> atmosphere, say the
> scientists.
>
> Burton Hurdle, of the Naval Research
> Laboratory in
> Washington DC, told New Scientist
> magazine: "The
> atmosphere itself would have been on
> fire. This could
> have contributed to the demise of the
> dinosaurs."
>
> Periodic escapes of gas
>
> As evidence, the researchers point to
> an earlier
> discovery of disruption in late
> Cretaceous sediments at
> Black Ridge, off the coast of Florida,
> which may have
> been due to methane release.
>
>
> A smaller
> "blow-out" is
> thought to have
> occurred in
> the Gulf of Mexico
> during the
> late Pleistocene
> epoch.
>
> More recent
> activity on the
> ocean floor
> suggests trapped
> methane
> periodically
> escapes even
> without
> asteroid strikes.
>
> Some scientists
> believe the
> Bermuda Triangle
> phenomenon could be
> explained by
> methane
> escaping and overwhelming passing ships
> or planes.
>
> Dinosaur expert Dr Angela Milner, from
> the Natural
> History Museum in London, said many
> dinosaurs appear
> to have been in serious decline even
> before the impact.
>
> But she agreed huge methane fires
> "could have been the
> final straw" for some species.
>
> LOUIS VARRICCHIO
> Environmental Information Specialist &
> Producer/Writer, "Our Changing Planet"
> (Visit OCP-TV on the Web at: www.umac.org/ocp)
> Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium
> Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences
> University of North Dakota
> Grand Forks, N.D. 58202-9007 U.S.A.
> Phone: 701-777-2482
> Fax: 701-777-2940
> E-mail: varricch@umac.org (in N.D.);
> morbius@together.net (in Vt.)
>
> "Behind every man alive stand thirty ghosts, for
> that is the ratio by
> which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn
> of time, a hundred
> billion human beings have walked the planet Earth."
> -- Arthur C. Clarke
>
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