I'm in the habit of listening to Radiolab on the way home from work on Saturdays. Generally quite interesting.
Yesterday, they presented the recorded live stage show that they've been touring, which had to do with the "K-T Event" or the big asteroid that was responsible for the extinction.
We've generally been taught (at least, I was) that the extinction was pretty gradual. The impact, the ejecta, the dimming of the sunlight, the collapse of plant growth, and gradual starvation and cooling doing in the dinos over a reasonably-long period of time. Exact estimates varied considerably.
The show presented a new view of the event based on impact studies. Sudden and extremely violent.
The idea being that the Mt. Everest-sized asteroid would have penetrated miles deep into the Earth, releasing sufficient energy to gasify all that material. That would have resulted in a plume of ejecta that would have extended far out into space (some bits potentially making it to Mars....).
This material, many millions of tons, would have cooled, mostly into glass, and been drawn back to the Earth by gravity. When it hit the atmosphere.... It would have been sort of like a meteor shower, or perhaps a meteor flood....
Raising the temperature of the atmosphere to over 1200 degrees farenheit, effectively killing most all surface life within a span of only a couple of hours.
Surviving species would have been in deep water, mud, burrows, and the like.
Interesting stuff. The guys did say that this idea wasn't exactly the new paradigm, but that extensive studies of high-speed impact characteristics support it pretty well.
You can listen to the radio broadcast or watch the video of the stage show at the Radiolab site:
http://ift.tt/1IhEeRV
Yesterday, they presented the recorded live stage show that they've been touring, which had to do with the "K-T Event" or the big asteroid that was responsible for the extinction.
We've generally been taught (at least, I was) that the extinction was pretty gradual. The impact, the ejecta, the dimming of the sunlight, the collapse of plant growth, and gradual starvation and cooling doing in the dinos over a reasonably-long period of time. Exact estimates varied considerably.
The show presented a new view of the event based on impact studies. Sudden and extremely violent.
The idea being that the Mt. Everest-sized asteroid would have penetrated miles deep into the Earth, releasing sufficient energy to gasify all that material. That would have resulted in a plume of ejecta that would have extended far out into space (some bits potentially making it to Mars....).
This material, many millions of tons, would have cooled, mostly into glass, and been drawn back to the Earth by gravity. When it hit the atmosphere.... It would have been sort of like a meteor shower, or perhaps a meteor flood....
Raising the temperature of the atmosphere to over 1200 degrees farenheit, effectively killing most all surface life within a span of only a couple of hours.
Surviving species would have been in deep water, mud, burrows, and the like.
Interesting stuff. The guys did say that this idea wasn't exactly the new paradigm, but that extensive studies of high-speed impact characteristics support it pretty well.
You can listen to the radio broadcast or watch the video of the stage show at the Radiolab site:
http://ift.tt/1IhEeRV
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1Yplzuo
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