the day the dinosaurs died?

commando

commando

Active member
a discovery in north dakota might give a picture of the day the meteor killed the dinosaurs.   it's a long read, but i found it very interesting.   

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

“When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t just any flood deposit,” DePalma said. “We weren’t just near the KT boundary—this whole site is the KT boundary!” From surveying and mapping the layers, DePalma hypothesized that a massive inland surge of water flooded a river valley and filled the low-lying area where we now stood, perhaps as a result of the KT-impact tsunami, which had roared across the proto-Gulf and up the Western Interior Seaway. As the water slowed and became slack, it deposited everything that had been caught up in its travels—the heaviest material first, up to whatever was floating on the surface. All of it was quickly entombed and preserved in the muck: dying and dead creatures, both marine and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks, roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs; tektites, shocked minerals, tiny diamonds, iridium-laden dust, ash, charcoal, and amber-smeared wood. As the sediments settled, blobs of glass rained into the mud, the largest first, then finer and finer bits, until grains sifted down like snow.

“We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments,” DePalma said. “With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died.” No paleontological site remotely like it had ever been found, and, if DePalma’s hypothesis proves correct, the scientific value of the site will be immense. When Walter Alvarez visited the dig last summer, he was astounded. “It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.”

 
BIG ERN said:
I've always found it interesting that the flood with Noah sounded delusional to most, but the dinosaurs dying to a meteor flood is reasonable. 
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soooo, which one of these arguments are you putting forward:

1) you have another scientific theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs, OR

2) we need to put more stock in the Noah's ark story?

 
BIG ERN said:
I've always found it interesting that the flood with Noah sounded delusional to most, but the dinosaurs dying to a meteor flood is reasonable. 
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i believe that it was more than just floods killing life on the planet that day.    giant tsunamis certainly played their part and are why this sight was preserved as it was....but the tsunamis were probably just a small part of that day

 
BIG ERN said:
I've always found it interesting that the flood with Noah sounded delusional to most, but the dinosaurs dying to a meteor flood is reasonable. 
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As told by the Bible, the flood is delusional and, scientifically speaking, impossible:

- Noah entered his ark in his 600th year of existence

- he had a male and female of every living creature on Earth

- the highest mountains on Earth were under water for 150 days

Meteor strikes happen every year so, as a theory, a dinosaur-ending one is more grounded in reality. I've never really viewed the two as analogous in any way other than they share the core similarity of natural catastrophe. Would be interesting to hear more of your take.

 
The Flood Myth that many cultures have has been loosely tied to the inundation of the Black Sea basin which occurred at a time when humans were living in the area.

From the Smithsonian:

The idea that ocean basins can flood catastrophically during periods of rising sea levels is nothing new in geology. Five million years ago, long before there were any humans around, just such an event occurred. The level of the Atlantic Ocean had dropped, or some tectonic event had occurred, with the result that water could no longer get through, and the Mediterranean gradually shrank down to a desert spotted with a few salty bits of ocean. Subsequently, when either the Atlantic rose again or another geological change took place, ocean water began pouring back into the former sea. The basin filled, and the present-day Mediterranean was created.

We know such things because sediments reveal history. Ryan and Pitman began taking cores of the present-day Black Sea. The cores seemed to be telling a strange story indeed, particularly in the northern areas. At the very bottom of the cores, dozens of feet below the present seafloor, they found layered mud typical of river deltas.

Carbon-dating of shells in this mud indicates that it was laid down between 18,000 and 8,600 years ago. This data showed that an area of the Black Sea about the size of Florida might have been much like the lower Mississippi Delta today — rich farmland with an abundant supply of fresh water.

Directly above the layers of mud is a layer of what Pitman calls "shell hash" — an inch-thick layer of broken shells — overlain by several feet of fine sediment of the type being brought into the Black Sea by rivers today. The shells in the "hash" are typical of what was in the Black Sea when it was a body of fresh water. The fine sediments contain evidence of saltwater species previously unknown in the Black Sea. It is the interpretation of these layers that tells us what happened on that inevitable day when rising sea levels in the Mediterranean reached the base of the sediments at the bottom of the Bosporus — and all hell broke loose.

When the Mediterranean began to flow northward, it "popped the plug" and pushed those sediments into a "tongue" of loose sediment on the bottom of what would become the present-day Black Sea (this tongue can still be seen in cores taken from the ocean bottom in that area). As the flow of water increased, it began to cut into the bedrock itself. The rock in this area is broken — Pitman calls it "trashy" — and even today rockslides are a major engineering problem for roads cut into the cliffs alongside the Bosporus. The incoming water eventually dug a channel more than 300 feet deep as it poured into the Black Sea basin, changing it from a freshwater lake to a saltwater ocean. In this scenario, the mud beneath the shell hash represents sediments from the rivers that fed the freshwater lake, the shell hash the remains of the animals that lived in that lake, and the layers above it the result of the saltwater incursion.

It was this event that Pitman and Ryan believe could be the flood recorded in the Book of Genesis. The salt water poured through the deepening channel, creating a waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls (anyone who has ever traveled to the base of the falls on the Maid of the Mist will have a sense of the power involved). In a single day enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan to a depth at least two times the height of the World Trade Center, and the roar of the cascading water would have been audible at least 100 miles away. Anyone living in the fertile farmlands on the northern rim of the sea would have had the harrowing experience of seeing the boundary of the ocean move inland at the rate of a mile a day.

In addition, Pitman and Ryan point out what archaeologists who study ancient civilizations have known for a long time: that at roughly the time of the flood, a number of people and new customs suddenly appeared in places as far apart as Egypt and the foothills of the Himalayas, Prague and Paris. The people included speakers of Indo-European, the language from which most modern European and Indian languages are derived. Pitman and Ryan suggest that these people might, in fact, represent a diaspora of Black Sea farmers who were driven from their homes by the flood, and that the flood itself might have been the cause of the breakup of Indo-European languages.
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JJ Husker said:
Pffft, next thing ya know people will be claiming that rainbows are the result of reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets rather than a heavenly sign of God’s promise to never flood the earth again.
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There would always have to be a human explanation of how things work - that doesn't prove or disprove anything. Lets say there is a higher power or God and they wanted the sky to be blue. We look up and the sky is blue. Yet people would be like well the sky is blue because blue light runs in shorter waves through the Earth's atmosphere. That still wouldn't take away from the fact that God wanted the sky blue and the sky is blue...

 
BIG ERN said:
There would always have to be a human explanation of how things work - that doesn't prove or disprove anything. Lets say there is a higher power or God and they wanted the sky to be blue. We look up and the sky is blue. Yet people would be like well the sky is blue because blue light runs in shorter waves through the Earth's atmosphere. That still wouldn't take away from the fact that God wanted the sky blue and the sky is blue...
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So, this is all sort of a rumination of the relationship between science and faith? That seems like a substantially different conversation than what's more believable between the story of Noah's Ark and the theory behind a dinosaur-ending meteor. (FWIW - just trying to better understand the source of your perspective/comments here).

By the way, that has the potential for some really interesting discussion/debate, but it is also probably more fitting for P&R. I can break out a separate topic if there's interest.

 
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