Stage 1: What caused the Chicxulub Impactor to enter the Earth’s atmosphere and hit Earth (2) About 65 million years ago an asteroid that is roughly 10 kilometres across, hit Earth on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It caused a huge explosion and left a crater that is about 185 kilometres across. This asteroid impact is commonly known to be the reason for the extinction of three quarters of the dinosaurs. (4) The asteroid soared through the sky at more than 40 times the speed of sound. (6) The earth moves through space in its orbit around the sun at 107,000 kilometres per hour. This makes the likelihood of an object to hit into Earth quite high. Luckily, most of the time those objects are as small as a pebble. This can be…
extinction happened because of the impact of a cosmic asteroid and created a massive explosion…
and our exploitation of the earth. In each of the book’s thirteen chapters, Kolbert highlights a particular species that is now extinct and analyzes the causes and effects of its extinction. She explains the scientific history of the concept of extinction. Just as the current concept of a sixth extinction seems impossible to grasp, once the idea of rapid extinction itself was believed to be impossible. It took centuries of paradigm shifts in order for the scientific community to take the notion…
for the mass extinction of the non-avian animals of the cretaceous period. This theory I think would go directly and support with the Asteroid Impact theory. But there could also be other triggers that caused this, perhaps volcanic activity. Aside from the volcanic activity triggers, and the fact, that there have been no fossil records, of any kind postdating the late cretaceous period with fossils, eggs, footprints, etc. leads paleontologist to believe that “something” caused the demise of the…
several million years the increased volcanic activity could have created enough soot and dust in the air that it blocked out the sunlight creating the cooler more varied climate that came with the Cenozoic Era. This seems like a very logical reasoning to why the climate would change but both the other hypothesis have a reasoning as well, the plate tectonics hypothesis suggest that there was a rearrangement of the continental plates that were occurring around the K-T boundary and this changed…
Dinosaurs, a dominating specie living in the Earth long time ago, extinct mysteriously. Paleontologists and scientists have established a variety of possible theories to explain. However, all these theories are still debatable.There are four main possible explanations: Asteroid Impact, Volcano Eruption, Falling Tide and Asteroid Impact theory was established by Luis Alvarez in 1980.Many plants and animals were disappeared abruptly from the fossil record as one moves from layers of rocks…
by Alexander, “Tourists now enjoy the sunshine and warm waters here, but 66 million years ago, it was dinosaurs that claimed their place in the sun” (Alexander 2). The asteroid also caused other chaotic events when it struck the surface of our blue and green planet. As said by Reynolds, “The consequences for everything in the region were terrible, and a years-long nuclear winter kicked dust into the atmosphere, ignited global fires, and played havoc with life on Earth” (Reynolds 1). The asteroid…
It is a common believe that mass extinction on our planet arose as a result of excessive warming and a deep acidification of the oceans. The asteroid theory states that the asteroid impact might have led to vaporization killing dinosaurs on the way. Dr. Keller’s hypothesis states that volcanic activity created a cascade effect that ended up in the extinction of these animals. Either way, experts commonly agree that dinosaurs could not survive in very hot environments. But how did extinction…
include terrestrial stresses (such as lower sea level or global temperature) and radiation (Pasichnyk, 2011), but the 2 theories that have become the most widely accepted as they have the most amount of supporting evidence are the Impact Theory (otherwise known as the Alvarez Hypothesis (Smith, 2005)) and the Volcanic Theory (Pasichnyk, 2011). The Impact Theory states that millions of years ago a comet or an asteroid struck the Earth and the impact of that is what killed the dinosaurs, it also…
Meghan Lewis Dinosaur Case Study September 25, 2017 Introduction Imagine if after 6 million years of existing on earth, the entire human race died out by the year 3320. Within a mere 1000 years’ all of humanity would be wiped from existence. This was the case with the dinosaurs and many other species living in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic period. 65 million years ago a meteorite roughly 10 km across hit the earth’s surface, and the impact would be a catalyst to the extinction of 75% of the species…