More arguing over the KT event

The Chicxulub Crater: Clues to the Demise of 65% of Planet's Species

The popular theory that Mexico's Chicxulub Crater, discovered in 1978, holds the clue to the demise of the dinosaurs, along with some 65 percent of all species 65 million years ago, has been confronted by a serious challenge from Gerta Keller of Princeton University in New Jersey, and Thierry Adatte of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. The team used evidence from Mexico to suggest that the Chicxulub impact predates the K-T boundary by as much as 300,000 years.

"Keller and colleagues continue to amass detailed stratigraphic information supporting new thinking about the Chicxulub impact, and the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous," says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "The two may not be linked after all."

From El Penon and other localities in Mexico, says Keller, "we know that between four and nine meters of sediments were deposited at about two to three centimeters per thousand years after the impact. The mass extinction level can be seen in the sediments above this interval."


more:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/the-chicxulub-crater-clue-to-the-demise-of-65-of-planets-species.html

I personally blame Dick Cheney.

For instance, why isn't there a cluster of fossils right at that boundary? Certainly there should have been in places like Siberia, far enough away from the blast to have escaped many of the immediate consequences but vulnerable to the climate change that followed.

The dieoff was more likely a combination of many things including vulcanism, slow starvation, and the vulnerability to disease that prolonged physical stress produces. It was more likely accomplished over thousands of years than overnight.

so if everything burned and died very rapidly, there wouldn't be much fossilization unless there was a cluster of animals in a very favorable fossilization spot.

I think the current thinking is a mixture of your idea and the impact. It appears there were outside stresses on the environment at the time of the impact.

that would not have if the world wide conflagration had occurred from ejected material re entering the biosphere.

The Deccan Traps were also active at about this time and provide evidence of a large contribution to the K-T extinction.