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if you google Chicxulub (the dinosaur killing space rock) a meteor will fly across your screen (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 26 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Fun fact, most of what we know about the impact and the meteor comes from data found during Nuclear Weapons Testing. The energy needed for crystallization at impact sites gave us the data we needed to extrapolate for the force of impact at the crater, alongside other factors such as liquification of granite.

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  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Also fun fact: ‘a meteor killed the dinosaurs’ is more or less universally accepted now, but younger folks might not realise it’s a pretty recent theory.

    It was first proposed in 1980, they found the likely impact site in 1991, and it was officially endorsed by an expert panel in 2010.

    I have books on my shelf from the 90s that say no one knows what killed the dinosaurs.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    In elementary school in the 90s I remember an exercise where we had to imagine what killed the dinosaurs. I came up with an implausible scenario of overpredation, and because I grew up in the south a classmate of mine said the Biblical flood killed them all and was praised by the teacher 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I wonder when we'll find out that flood basalts (the Deccan Traps, in this case) are the "exit wounds" of the meteor impacts?

    (That's my hypothesis, anyway, but I don't have the geology background to investigate it properly.)

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