That's just one of the interesting observations in this article:

https://scitechdaily.com/volcanoes-or-asteroid-ai-ends-debate-over-dinosaur-extinction-event/

Its main thrust is that the Deccan Traps are what caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and the Chixulub
asteroid had effects that were minor in comparison.

Which, of course, is good news in the event the Earth gets
hit by an asteroid!

John Savard

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On 09/12/2023 00:37, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 11/27/2023 4:15 PM, Quadibloc wrote:

That's just one of the interesting observations in this article:

"In modern context, Cox said, the burning of fossil fuels from 2000 to
2023 has pumped about 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere per year. This is 100 times greater than the highest annual
emission rate scientists project from the Deccan Traps. While alarming
on its own, it would still take a few thousand years for current carbon
dioxide emissions to match the total amount that spewed forth from the
ancient volcanoes, Cox said."

This doesn't mean current rates of industrial CO2 release (now about
37GT/y, not 16GT/y) would take thousands of years [1] to cause an
extinction of the human species.

The important quantity is the amount of free CO2 in the environment (sea
and air), and the rate at which it is produced can be more important
than the total quantity released over long time scales.



[1] actually 45 to 540 years. Estimates vary widely, but mostly suggest
the Deccan Traps released from about 1,700 GT to 20,000 GT of CO2 total,
with the pure geologists' estimates typically at the low end of the
scale and most climatologists' estimates at the higher end - except
these particular climatologists, who estimate 75,000 GT - "oh, it's
within 5 times the estimate some other climatologist made."

fyi, Traps are the rock left over from slow but very large volcanic
eruptions, so called because the rock forms steps ("Traps" in German I
think). Also can refer to the eruptions themselves.

https://scitechdaily.com/volcanoes-or-asteroid-ai-ends-debate-over-dinosaur-extinction-event/a team at Dartmouth College took an innovative approach — they removed scientists from the debate and let the computers decide

"A team at Dartmouth College took an innovative approach — they removed scientists from the debate and let the computers decide."

An aside - Cox and Keller are well-known for promoting the volcanism hypothesis.

Its main thrust is that the Deccan Traps are what caused the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and the Chixulub
asteroid had effects that were minor in comparison.

er, nobody doubts that the KT boundary was caused by the meteorite, they
are saying that the associated mass extinction was caused by the Traps.

Which, of course, is good news in the event the Earth gets
hit by an asteroid!

John Savard

Since we were not there, this is just one hypothesis amongst many others.

And not a very convincing one. There are plenty of papers which come to
the opposite conclusion.

“Our model worked through the data independently and without human bias
to determine the amount of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide required to produce the climate and carbon cycle disruptions we see in the geologic
record. These amounts turned out to be consistent with what we expect to
see in emissions from the Deccan Traps,”

("consistent" - meaning actually about four or five times as much as the
high end of other estimates of what was actually released)

So, they worked out how much CO2/SOx would need to be released to
produce the KT mass extinction - then used that figure to show that that
the release was the cause of the extinction.

Circular reasoning anyone?


## Yes I know they call it the K-Pg extinction now. Like they renamed
dinosaurs - b@st@rds! ##



Personally I think the Traps put considerable strain on the ecology, and
the impact flipped that strain into mass extinction - and the impact
also increased the output from the Traps, making the extinction worse.

The shake from the impact made the Traps give a big blurp, then close
down for several 100,000 years. The major second phase of eruptions were actually over before the KT impact event, there had been some
extinctions at that point but nothing the scale of the KT mass
extinction, which happened several 10.000 years after the eruptions were basically over.

In other words, the Deccan traps alone would not have caused such a
large extinction without the impact. My 2c.


Now the end-Permian extinction ("The Great Dying"), that's another
story. The Siberian traps were/are about 35 times larger than the
Deccan, and the CO2/SOx from them, combined with a clathrate release ...
well, no impact needed to explain that.






Peter Fairbrother

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Robert Carnegie <[email protected]> wrote:

Amusingly, a careful treatment of the Christian bible
story of Noah's ark, in which most life on Earth is
destroyed, shows that it must be the case that Noah put
dinosaurs on the ark, and therefore they were saved.
I understand that an "official" answer by some is that
an Ice Age followed at once, which isn't mentioned in
the bible, and the saved dinosaurs died of that. For myself,
I note that a great many of the creatures on Noah's ark
are sacrificed by him to God as soon as the boat finds
land. So perhaps Noah caused the mass extinction.

And yet he saved so many damn insects. Sheesh.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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On 09/12/2023 23:57, Robert Carnegie wrote:

On Saturday 9 December 2023 at 18:42:46 UTC, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

On 09/12/2023 00:37, Lynn McGuire wrote:

Its main thrust is that the Deccan Traps are what caused the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and the Chixulub
asteroid had effects that were minor in comparison.

er, nobody doubts that the KT boundary was caused by the meteorite, they
are saying that the associated mass extinction was caused by the Traps.

You seem to know more about this than I do,
but I suppose that the KT boundary in geology
and archaeology is "the end of dinosaurs"

Technically, the KT boundary is just a thin visible layer in deposited
rock. It is visible worldwide, and it is pretty thin, typically 1mm or
so, thin enough to be called a boundary between much thicker layers. It happened all over the world at exactly the same time, and it is
undoubtedly a result of the Chixuilub meteorite impact.

The KT mass extinction event, including the end of the dinosaurs,
happened at about the same time.


along

with other species mass extinctions at the same
time, in geological terms. Due to a rather large
meteor, there is a narrow layer rich in iridium
all over the Earth, basically.

yep, that layer is the KT boundary layer. Though "rich" in iridium is
perhaps a misnomer, the amount of iridium in the layer is tiny in
anything except compared-to-rock-generally terms.

Iridium from the

meteor. This does appear to coincide exactly
with the end of dinosaurs, but "exactly" in geology
can be a million years adrift.

yep, nearly exact is closer. However the major KT extinctions, and the
majority of KT extinctions, appear to have happened pretty much exactly
at the same time the KT boundary was formed.

About 2.300,000 years before the KT boundary event there was a major
volcanic eruption in what is now Deccan in India. It wasn't a
particularly violent event, more of a (actually several) mass flow than
a bang, but it was huge. Some few species became extinct at this time -
the eruptions release CO2 and SOx - and the environment was put under
some pressure.

About 70,000 years before KTbe, there were some more and even bigger
lava flows into the Deccan Traps - about 80,000 km^3 of lava. Again,
some few species became extinct or less common. These flows were
declining and probably over at least 10.000 years before the KT boundary
event impact.

Afaics the mass extinctions took place at or very soon after the KT
event itself.

I remember being told

that this happened 65 million years ago. It's
66 million years now, apparently. I'm not that old. ;-)

Kt boundary is 66.04 mya by todays best estimate. 65 mya was an estimate
used when "they" could only calculate the age to within a few million
years or so ... :)

Iridium is not understood as fatal, generally.

Nope, iridium is pretty harmless. And even if was as poisonous as say dimethylmercury or botulinum toxin, there wouldn't have been enough of
it around to kill anybody.

A version I've heard recently is that iridium and other
matter of, or from, the meteor and its impact, was
ejected up to space, rained down again everywhere
else on Earth,

so far, so good. Though note most of the stuff that rained down was
ordinary rock from the Earth splashed up from the impact, plus a little
meteor rock with iridium. It all ended up in the KT layer.


and heated the atmosphere to the point

of cooking most living things where they stood.

I think it is doubtful it got quite that hot. But anything flammable
would have burned. Lots of CO2 produced. It likely got very hot for a
few years, then perhaps very cold for a few hundred, years, then hot again.

That was fatal, quickly. Individual dinosaurs might
survive it, however - but a contest of all species
to dominate or to die out on the rearranged Earth
would happen next. The dinosaurs lost.

I don't think quite that happened, the dinosaurs probably all just died.
Any succession contest most likely happened a few million years later.

Except

for the birds, which we still have, for now, some of them.

Amusingly, a careful treatment of the Christian bible
story of Noah's ark, in which most life on Earth is
destroyed, shows that it must be the case that Noah put
dinosaurs on the ark, and therefore they were saved.
I understand that an "official" answer by some is that
an Ice Age followed at once, which isn't mentioned in
the bible, and the saved dinosaurs died of that. For myself,
I note that a great many of the creatures on Noah's ark
are sacrificed by him to God as soon as the boat finds
land. So perhaps Noah caused the mass extinction.

well this is science fiction, written ...

As for the Deccan Traps and other volcanic emissions,
I thought they wouldn't emit CO2

no, definitely lots of CO2. The slightly less well understood question
is how much SOx they produced - could be enough to cause global cooling,
or maybe the CO2 produced caused global warming.


Peter Fairbrother

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In article <ul3dkk$2igc6$[email protected]>,
Peter Fairbrother <[email protected]> wrote:

On 09/12/2023 23:57, Robert Carnegie wrote:

As for the Deccan Traps and other volcanic emissions,
I thought they wouldn't emit CO2

no, definitely lots of CO2. The slightly less well understood question
is how much SOx they produced - could be enough to cause global cooling,
or maybe the CO2 produced caused global warming.

As I recall, the Siberian Traps (implicated in the End Permian) tilted
the balance in favour of CO2 because the region involved in the flood
basalt event was rich in coal.
--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

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In article <[email protected]>,
Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote:

That's just one of the interesting observations in this article:

https://scitechdaily.com/volcanoes-or-asteroid-ai-ends-debate-over-dinosaur-extinction-event/

Its main thrust is that the Deccan Traps are what caused the >Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and the Chixulub
asteroid had effects that were minor in comparison.

Which, of course, is good news in the event the Earth gets
hit by an asteroid!

[Hal Heydt]
Luis Alvarez and his team investigated the idea that the Deccan
Traps were responsible for the K-T boundary. They foud that the
timing was wrong. The Deccan Traps eruptions were separated from
the boundary by at least 1 million years.

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On 10 Dec 2023 02:26:59 -0000, [email protected] (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

Robert Carnegie <[email protected]> wrote:

Amusingly, a careful treatment of the Christian bible
story of Noah's ark, in which most life on Earth is
destroyed, shows that it must be the case that Noah put
dinosaurs on the ark, and therefore they were saved.
I understand that an "official" answer by some is that
an Ice Age followed at once, which isn't mentioned in
the bible, and the saved dinosaurs died of that. For myself,
I note that a great many of the creatures on Noah's ark
are sacrificed by him to God as soon as the boat finds
land. So perhaps Noah caused the mass extinction.

And yet he saved so many damn insects. Sheesh.

Although (IIRC) certain locusts are considered "clean" (that is,
edible), there is no clear statement of where the insects came from.

Perhaps the concept of "spontaneous generation" made saving them
unnecessary.

This was, after all, a long time before the fact that "life comes from
life" was established.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

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On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 15:57:06 -0800 (PST), Robert Carnegie <[email protected]> wrote:

<snippo actual information about Deccan Traps etc>

Amusingly, a careful treatment of the Christian bible
story of Noah's ark, in which most life on Earth is
destroyed, shows that it must be the case that Noah put
dinosaurs on the ark, and therefore they were saved.
I understand that an "official" answer by some is that
an Ice Age followed at once, which isn't mentioned in
the bible, and the saved dinosaurs died of that. For myself,
I note that a great many of the creatures on Noah's ark
are sacrificed by him to God as soon as the boat finds
land. So perhaps Noah caused the mass extinction.

It /is/ amusing. Sadly, the "treatment" might be better described as
"fanciful" than as "careful".

Although /Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis/ by Robert Graves &
Raphael Patai does (IIRC) report a note from the Talmud asserting that
the primordial monsters (such as Behemoth) were towed behind the Ark
as they were too large to take aboard, nothing is said about
"dinosaurs".

And those were aquatic critters, while the Flood was only intended to
remove ground and air critters.

So perhaps Noah had nothing to do with the mass extinction.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

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On 14/12/2023 02:41, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

In article <[email protected]>, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote:

That's just one of the interesting observations in this article:

https://scitechdaily.com/volcanoes-or-asteroid-ai-ends-debate-over-dinosaur-extinction-event/

Its main thrust is that the Deccan Traps are what caused the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and the Chixulub
asteroid had effects that were minor in comparison.

Here the paper is referring to the K-T mass extinction, not the KT
boundary layer event. The paper itself does not suggest that the Traps
caused the layer, and no-one thinks that.

There is no real doubt that the layer itself is solely a result of the
impact; whether the extinctions were or weren't caused by the
event/impact is a different question, which is what the paper is about.

Though note, contrary to the headline, the paper does not conclude that
the Traps alone caused all the extinctions. It even specifically says
the meteor caused some of them, maybe the majority.


Some definitions:

The K-T boundary - is a visible layer in accreting rock laid down about
66 Mya, visible in places all over the world. Generally speaking, the
fossils in the layers above and below the layer are different, and
sometimes, where the accretion is at least partly biological in nature,
the rock above and below is different too.

The K-T boundary event - is the event which caused the K-T boundary, ie
it is the impact of a meteor in Chicxulub 66 million years ago.

The K-T mass extinction - the "end of the dinosaurs", but not just the dinosaurs, a lot of other species went extinct too. It happened over a
few million years, but the bulk of the extinctions seem to have happened
at or about the time of the K-T event.

Luis Alvarez and his team investigated the idea that the Deccan
Traps were responsible for the K-T boundary. They found that the > timing was wrong. The Deccan Traps eruptions were separated from
the boundary by at least 1 million years.

The boundary is a few years or millenia deep - the Traps erupted over
several million years.

Best modern theory, though I may be a bit out-of-date here, is that the
Traps flows happened in 3 main phases. First phase was about 2.4My
before the impact, second phase was about 150ky before, third phase was
about 1My after.

Phases lasted from 10 to 150 ky, but the second phase was either mostly
over or actually over (best guess is a few 10s of ky over) at the time
of the KT boundary event.

We can't see the K-T layer in the Traps themselves because the third
phase covered it up and melted and dispersed it, but looking at where it
joins the traps it's usually after the second wave. Some geologists think/thought the K-T layer is in the early third phase.



In general, mass extinctions seem to follow geological mass lava flows,
at least sometimes.

So, did the Deccan Traps cause the K-T mass extinction, or did the meteor?

In this case, everyone agrees, both.

My view, about 3/4 or more impact, but ymmv.




To get back to Science Fiction (by which I mean scientifically plausible
things which we don't know have happened), perhaps some dinosaurs - or
other species alive at the time - became intelligent and were wiped out
by an alien-directed rock. Certainly plausible, fits the facts.

Including the pre-event extinctions. When a species becomes intelligent,
other species become extinct.

Of course, if the species becomes really intelligent - but wouldn't you
want to extinctify mosquitoes and horseflies?

Unless they have been left as canaries ...




Peter Fairbrother

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In article <ulipj7$23trk$[email protected]>,
Peter Fairbrother <[email protected]> wrote:

On 14/12/2023 02:41, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

In article <[email protected]>, Quadibloc <[email protected]> wrote:

That's just one of the interesting observations in this article:

https://scitechdaily.com/volcanoes-or-asteroid-ai-ends-debate-over-dinosaur
-extinction-event/

Its main thrust is that the Deccan Traps are what caused the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and the Chixulub
asteroid had effects that were minor in comparison.

Here the paper is referring to the K-T mass extinction, not the KT
boundary layer event. The paper itself does not suggest that the Traps
caused the layer, and no-one thinks that.

<SNIP!>

So, did the Deccan Traps cause the K-T mass extinction, or did the meteor?

In this case, everyone agrees, both.

My view, about 3/4 or more impact, but ymmv.

To get back to Science Fiction (by which I mean scientifically plausible things which we don't know have happened), perhaps some dinosaurs - or
other species alive at the time - became intelligent and were wiped out
by an alien-directed rock. Certainly plausible, fits the facts.

Don't need aliens. It could had been a Spacer Rebellion (the Spacers
took drastic action to end Earth rule). I think I read more than one
story that used that idea.

--
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan describes progress in _Komarr_. —-----------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodward [email protected]

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