Hi Ron - Did Morrison referee this one?
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090223/full/news.2009.112.html "The impact of a huge asteroid or comet" uhhh - the impactor is known to have been a comet, and that has been known for quite some time. "at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago is generally held responsible for the sudden demise of 60???80% of all species on Earth. But new results challenge the common idea that the extinctions were partly caused by global wildfires triggered by the violent impact." "Claire Belcher and colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London in Surrey, UK, say in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the widespread soot deposits in sedimentary rocks formed at the time of the putative impact are not, as previously asserted, evidence of runaway fires caused by the meteorite's impact." How about soot from the comet itself? "The researchers think the soot comes from combustion of hydrocarbons within the rocks of the impact site itself" How about soot from the comet's hydrocarbons? However you work the dynamics of the KT impact, you end up with a rain of molten impact debris which was perfectly capable of setting the surface of the Earth on fire. I suspect this team's measurement or laboratory techniques. E.P. Grondine Man and Impact in the Americas ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
