Giant asteroid killed off dinosaurs 66,038,000 million years ago: study

[Playinghardball]

Scientists said Thursday they are a step closer to proving the death blow for dinosaurs 66 million years ago was a gigantic comet or asteroid that struck near Mexico.

Although a catastrophic impact has long been thought to be involved earlier work left doubts about just when the object, estimated at some six miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, struck in relation to when dinosaurs disappeared.

But in a study out Thursday in the US journal “Science,” researchers used updated techniques to get a more precise date for the impact — 66,038,000 million years ago — which they said was accurate within 11,000 years.

“When I got started in the field, the error bars on these events were plus or minus a million years,” said paleontologist William Clemens, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus who was not directly involved in the study.

The researchers also updated their estimate for the time the mass dinosaur extinction, and found that the date was within the same margin of error — in other words, at around the same time as the asteroid impact.

“We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat’s eyebrow,” said Paul Renne, of the Berkeley Geochronology Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point,” he said.

More at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/07/giant-asteroid-killed-off-dinosaurs-66038000-million-years-ago-study/

[longship]

1. Paleontologists have been on this track for years.

Only a few outliers still say that there were multiple causes. That's what spurns all of them on.

Science is a competitive enterprise. That, and the reach for nature's truth, is what drives it. It better be, because scientists don't get rich.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. "66,038,000 million" is not "66 million"

AFP has got it hopelessly wrong once in the text; and Raw Story has copied that for their title.

[exboyfil]

3. Boy that is a big number

66x10^12 years versus 66x10^6.

On a more serious note the iridium layer laid down by the impact is one of the strongest checks on radioactive dating. The layer is worldwide, and the predictions, using different methods, all come within a reasonable margin of error for its age.

Of course if you are Republican then all this is from the "pits of hell". By the way Broun is looking at Chambliss' Senate seat.

[Cali_Democrat]

4. What? The Earth is only 5,000 years old

Dinosaur bones were placed here by god to test our faith. The conservative Christians wouldn't lie to us.

These are lies straight from the pit of hell

[Victor_c3]

8. nope. According to conservapedia.com Noah had two dinosaurs on the arc with him

http://www.conservapedia.com/Dinosaurs

[cbrer]

5. Nuh-Uh, God killed 'em!

You and your scientists are just working for Satan!

[JCMach1]

6. or not...

Tens of thousands of years of lava flow from the Deccan Traps, a volcanic region near Mumbai in present-day India, may have spewed poisonous levels of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and caused the mass extinction through the resulting global warming and ocean acidification, the research suggests.

The findings, presented Wednesday (Dec. 5) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are the latest volley in an ongoing debate over whether an asteroid or volcanism killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago in the mass die-off known as the K-T extinction.

"Our new information calls for a reassessment of what really caused the K-T mass extinction," said Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University who conducted the study.

For several years, Keller has argued that volcanic activity killed the dinosaurs... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/08/volcanoes-killed-dinosaurs-india_n_2258395.html

[Blue_In_AK]

7. I've always suspected that the volcanos weakened the dinosaurs

and that the comet or asteroid was the final blow. It seems there could have been more than one contributing factor to the extinction.