Double meteorite strike 'caused dinosaur extinction' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Howard Falcon-Lang
Science reporter, BBC News

The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.

Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.

Now evidence for a second impact in Ukraine has been uncovered.

This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites.

The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11112417

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Every time a group of critters gets too uppity,

God takes them down. She's gonna get us next.

[starroute]

2. There's also the Shiva crater in the sea bed west of Mumbai

Not all scientists agree, but the idea is definitely out there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_crater

The Shiva crater is a sea floor structure located beneath the Indian Ocean, west of Mumbai, India. It was named by the paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee after Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and renewal.

Its age is estimated to be around 65 million years, created at about the same time as a number of other impact craters and the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (K-T boundary). Although the site has shifted since its formation because of sea floor spreading, the formation is approximately 600 kilometers long by 400 km wide. It is estimated that a crater of that size would have been made by an asteroid or comet approximately 40 km in diameter. The Shiva complex adds weight to the theory that the K-T extinction was caused by a massive asteroid fragmenting and hitting the Earth in several locations, known as the "multiple impact theory".