How Asteroid Spelt Doom for the Dinosaurs - Times

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September 6, 2007 MOST READ MOST COMMENTED MOST CURIOUS How asteroid spelt doom for the dinosaurs TODAY Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear... Briton hailed as 'silent hero' of Thailand... Mark Henderson, Science Editor Rally champion Colin McRae dies with son in... The fate of the dinosaurs was sealed almost 100 million years before Prepare for prolonged turmoil, says US... they were wiped out and before many of the latest species had even evolved, according to research that reveals how a cosmic collision caused mass extinction on Earth.

The 10km-wide (6.2 miles) asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico 65 million years ago, causing the end of the dinosaurs, was almost certainly created by a head-on smash between two even-larger space rocks about 160 million years ago, scientists have discovered.

An asteroid 170km (105 miles) in diameter was ripped into thousands of smaller fragments, known as the Baptistina family, when it was struck by another, 60km wide, at a speed of 3km per second.

It peppered the Earth, the Moon, Venus and Mars with debris that has scarred their surfaces to this day, a study led by William Bottke, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, has found.

One of the larger pieces spiralled through space for 95 million years before striking the Earth 65 million years ago, forming the Chicxulub crater and triggering the Cretaceous/tertiary mass extinction event in which the dinosaurs died out. FOCUS ZONE

The Baptistina asteroid shower continues to threaten the Earth. It New Horizons Read our guide for the generation of travellers produced at least 1,000 smaller asteroids at least 1km in diameter, and who have raised families and now want to between a fifth and a third of the near-Earth objects that cross our raise their levels of world experience. planet’s orbit. A strike from a 1km object would cause devastation on a continental stage and threaten the survival of civilisation, while another The Grade Entrepreneurs 10km impact would have the same effect it did 65 million years ago. Celebrate Sydney's Summer Upfront Rugby Fantasy CEO Galaxy of Stories Such an event remains very unlikely. Though the Baptistina break-up is thought to have doubled the rate at which large asteroids strike the Fink Tank Football Your World Earth, only one 10km object collides with the planet every 350 million Business Travel years. QUICKLINKS The study, which is published in the journal Nature, sought to explain why the cratering rate on the Earth and the Moon appears to have SU DOKU doubled over the past 100-200 million years. Now Interactive Dr Bottke’s team traced the increase to an event 160 million years ago, Love Sudoku? Play our brand new interactive game: with added functionality and daily prizes. in which the asteroid family was born. It takes its name from the largest member that still exists today, a 40km asteroid known as Baptistina.

Dr Bottke said chemical analysis showed that the asteroid shower was Su Doku Driving Career & Jobs the most likely source, a 90 per cent probability, of the impact that Travel Podcasts Photo Galleries produced the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The other possibilities - that it was a comet from the edges of the solar SERVICES system, or a preexisting asteroid - had only a 10 per cent chance of being correct. Business City Guides Times TV World News Free Finance Brochures Dating Philippe Claeys, of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, said that Self-study Courses Free Credit Report the most important point raised by Dr Bottke’s work was how severe the repercussions of cataclysmic collisions in the asteroid belt could be for the Earth-Moon system: “The terrestrial impact record needs to be Business City Guides scrutinised more closely to identify and understand these periods of Overseas contacts and local more intense bombardment, and to link them to the huge and dangerous business information game of billiards continuously being played out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.” Search our archive The Times and The Sunday HAVE YOUR SAY Times articles from 1985 Wolf Schmitz, Evolution did not stop. It's still going on.But then why we don't see it you ask. That's because it an extremely slow process. We can see differences when looking back across hundreds of millenias of earth history. Mankind came about only like a few thousand years ago. What you see in nature today would only be a snapshot of that slow process called evolution. Animals do not change "from one kind or another" as you put it. they just adapt

1 of 3 18/09/2007 12:00 How asteroid spelt doom for the dinosaurs - Times ... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/artic...

changing to another one. Give it a few hundred millenia and come back. The Times Online Jobs turtle might have become something so different from the tortoise, adapting From grad to exec, make the better to the marine life. From that point of view looking retrospectively you most of your career would have seen evolution in play Brian Chung, Sydney, Australia

I see the evolution denialists are everywhere even in Canada. I was a little CLASSIFIEDS surprised by this, I thought the USA was the home of the Christian fundamentalist. OK lets get some perspective here, according to the evolution CARS JOBS denialists, (Christian fundamentalists), the earth is actually only 4400 years old. The true reason for the dinosaurs dying out is of course that Noah could PROPERTY TRAVEL not get them on the Arc?? Surely this is much more believable no? The truth of course is that the Christian fundamentalist hate Darwin, because in a word his CARS OF THE WEEK discovery of evolution, finally killed of any idea of god. God is dead, long live Porsche Cayenne evolutionism. Continental 6.0 GTC Conv brent, london, 2005/05 £34,500 Emma, it has more to do with the velocity of the asteroid rather than it's size. South West England Whilst an asteroid may only be a few kilometers wide, it can travel at 28,000 miles per hour. 2007 Aston Martin vanquish S V12 2+2 2dr Auto As an example, an 800 foot diameter asteroid can weigh 25 million tons and July - 07 have the impact energy equivalent to 65,000 of the atomic bombs that £219,995 destroyed Hiroshima. As well as the massive explosion of molten South East asteroid/earth and the incredibly high tsunami, the dust would float in the atmosphere for thousands of years, blocking out the sun, wiping out plant life MORE TH>N Car Insurance and, of course, the animals that eat it, and the animals that eat those animals 15% discount online (e.g. humans). Chris, Perth, Australia

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