Dinosaur Killers

by Popoff, Alexander

  The proposed stagnant ocean model includes a warm atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide and a region of the ocean from depths of 200 to 6,000 meters (660 to 20,000 feet) dominated by bacterial components in the food web. Culminations of prolonged stagnant episodes correspond with marine animal extinctions of Late Permian and Late Cretaceous periods. The protracted changes provide evidence against any hypothesis of mass extinction by sudden global catastrophe, including an asteroid impact. The Cretaceous stagnant ocean caused climatic warming triggered by volcanic carbon dioxide, inducing greenhouse effect, and several contributing factors like decreased Earth albedo (fraction of the sunlight reflected back into space) and increased sinking of warm evaporate brines instead of aerated polar waters.

  Marine extinctions are attributed to upward expansion of the oxygen minimum zone and to catastrophic mixing of surface waters with poisonous sulfidic waters of the deeps. Most of the land flora and fauna went extinct as a result of the hot climate.

  Keith suggested that trace elements in stagnant ocean sediments, including chalcophile and platinum group metals, are negating claims that iridium provides a unique “fingerprint” of meteorite impact and cosmic accretion.

  The protracted changes provide evidence against any hypothesis of mass extinction by sudden worldwide catastrophe, including the asteroid impact hypothesis.

  Temperatures during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods were relatively high, and the dissolved oxygen levels in the oceans were lower than today, making anoxia easier to achieve.

  Oceanic anoxic events have been recognized primarily from the already warm Cretaceous and Jurassic periods, but it have been suggested that such catastrophic events have occurred in the late Triassic, Permian, Devonian, Ordovician, and Cambrian.

  121. Radioactive volcanic dust.

  Many volcanic ash deposits have been identified as containing significant levels of radioactive elements.

  In 2013, the Malaysian Health Ministry has advised the public to refrain from buying and using pendants made of volcanic ash, containing natural radioactive substances, as it could damage their health and cause cancer.

  When the dose is acute, the amount of radioactive volcanic ash is sufficient plants and animals to die directly from radiation sickness.

  When the dose is chronic, smaller amounts of volcanic dust would cover huge areas with poisonous radioactive material, which could finish off most of the flora and the fauna on land and in the oceans in several generations only. Even if the radiation doses are relatively low, the animals would constantly consume radioactive food, drink radioactive water, and live in a radioactive environment. There isan increased cancer risk andcomplex clinical symptoms as a late effect from protracted radiation.

  Only a small part of the flora and the fauna would survive an eruption of volcanoes containing significant levels of radioactive materials.

  122. Ozone depletion by volcanic gases.

  According to M. L. Keith, professor emeritus of geochemistry at Pennsylvania State University, gases from volcanic eruptions have depleted the protective ozone layer and have caused the mass extinction at the end of Cretaceous. Furry mammals and feathered birds were better protected from the harmful ultraviolet rays and survived; the large, bare-skinned animals such as dinosaurs perished.

  Other creatures protected themselves by hiding under bushes and trees, submerging in the rivers, seas, and oceans; some animals stayed most of the time under rocks and in caves, or buried themselves in the ground.

  Many of the plants also died from the excessive ultraviolet radiation. The severe food crisis, the unfavorable genetic mutations, skin cancer, cataracts, weakened immune system, etc., finished off most of the species.

  123. Supernova explosion.

  Iosif Shklovsky, Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist, proposed in his book Intelligent Life in the Universe, published in 1962, that cosmic rays from supernova explosions could have been responsible for some of the mass extinctions on Earth.

  A star can go supernova in two ways: it accumulates matter from a nearby neighbor until a nuclear reaction ignites, or it runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity.

  A supernova occurs about once every 50 years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. It can briefly outshine even galaxies and radiate more energy than our Sun will in its entire lifetime.

  The expanding shell of debris, the supernova remnants, creates a nebula that radiates radio waves, X-rays, and light for hundreds or thousands of years.

  A supernova explosion showered Earth with newly formed elements heavier than iron, including the iridium that the researchers are now finding in the K-Pg boundary layer.

  The powerful cosmic radiation by the explosion of the nearby supernova directly killed off most of the animals, including the dinosaurs. The explosion heated up the atmosphere and made the soil, plants, waters, and animals radioactive, and left most of the survivors sterile. The radiation caused irreparable DNA harm, leading to cellular mutation, abnormal growth or division of cells, and cancer. Only about a quarter of species have survived.

  Researchers claim that evidence for a supernova explosion is the enormous ring of interstellar neutral hydrogen about 30,000 billion kilometers in diameter near the Solar System. The speed of the expansion of the cloud and its dimensions indicates that the explosion occurred about 66 million years ago.

  A minor variation of the supernova explosion theory suggests that the increased gamma rays flux broke down the protective ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet radiation to kill off the dinosaurs, and triggered an ice age or severely cooled the planet. The flora and the fauna were used to the warm climate of the Mesozoic, and most of the species who survived the harmful ultraviolet radiation perished in the cold climate.

  124. Prolonged massive coal fires.

  In the K-Pg boundary clay all around the world there is charcoal from massive burning.

  The climate of the Cretaceous Period was much warmer than at present. It was perhaps the warmest climate in the last 600 million years. Due to the warm, steady climate and the abundant carbon dioxide the plant mass was much larger than today.

  During the Mesozoic period there existed only a few very primitive decomposing bacteria and some fungi. The dead plants and the corpses of the animals could last for long time not decaying. In this environment the dead plant mass did not decompose rapidly and it transformed into coal. By the end of the Cretaceous period there were huge amounts of open deposits of dead plants, peat, and coal.

  The oxygen peak at the end of the Cretaceous caused massive coal combustion. Coals usually are occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The burning of open coal deposits and coal beds heavily polluted the environment, reduced sunlight, and cooled the climate.

  Coal fires are also a source for huge amounts of carbon dioxide, causing heavy acid rains and toxic air pollution. The spewed ash was highly toxic and poisoned plants, drinking waters, and the environment. Naturally occurring toxic and radioactive elements in coal are significantly concentrated into the flying ash during burning.

  The burning coal is a source of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead, soot, hydrocarbons, etc., which can penetrate into the lungs and be absorbed by the bloodstream, causing cancer and other diseases.

  Remarkably high arsenic contents has been reported in numerous K-Pg boundary clays worldwide. It is suggested that it was generated by combustion of fossil fuels coal or oil near the Chicxulub impact site, or it was caused by post-impact combustion of tremendous amounts of biomass.

  Arsenic in bituminous coal occurs primarily in pyrite and, to a lesser extent, in organic portions of the coal. A fraction of this arsenic is emitted during coal combustion. There is arsenic in the K-Pg boundary clay and in the fossils of the animals.

  In some regions of China like Guizhou Province, surface coal deposits are plentiful. Coal is the primary fuel for domestic use. Unfortunately, some of these coals
have undergone mineralization, causing their enrichment in toxic elements like arsenic, fluorine, mercury, antimony, and thallium. They have profound adverse effects on the health of millions of people worldwide. In China, several hundred million people burn raw coal in unvented stoves. Tens of thousands of them are suffering from severe arsenic poisoning, mainly by consuming of chili peppers dried over fires fueled with high-arsenic coal.

  There is iridium in coal veins; marshy environment favors coal deposition and can concentrate metals like iridium. The iridium anomaly could be caused by massive burning of coals and by vigorous volcanic activity at the end of the Cretaceous.

  The reduced light due to smoke clouds inhibited the photosynthesis and decreased temperatures.

  The severe pollution of the environment, the changed climate (cooling and soon after that warming up due to the greenhouse effect), and the reduced plant mass caused the tremendous extinction at the end of Cretaceous.

  125. Antipodal volcanism.

  The antipodal volcanism theory suggests that the bolide strike could trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the globe.

  Astronomers are identifying areas on the Moon, Mercury, icy satellites, and other space bodies where impact craters were antipodal to volcanoes and sites of broken crust.

  “The Earth acts like a lens,” said Mark Boslough. “It focuses the energy. There’s been a lot of speculation about this in relation to asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions, but we’ve done the first rigorous modeling to show where the energy actually goes.”

  Geologists have long known that strong earthquakes send out shock waves that propagate through the Earth and focus at the quake’s antipode.

  These volcanic eruptions are thought to have originated in the Deccan Traps, approximately on the opposite side of the Earth from the Chicxulub impact crater at the time.

  The Cretaceous mass extinction is the result of a long volcanic eruption (Deccan Traps) triggered by a meteorite strike. Both the volcanic activity and the impact caused the specific pattern of the Cretaceous extinction.

  The Sandia team used a powerful computer to simulate the damage a bolide about six miles in diameter would have wrought at the impact’s antipode. The team discovered that the crust there would have heaved as high as 60 feet in a series of catastrophic tremors. In comparison, the ground at the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 moved a few feet at most.

  126. Competition among the dinosaurs.

  Fighting for territories, the flying dinosaurs outcompeted their walking and swimming brothers, eating and destroying their eggs.

  127. Long-term climate fluctuations.

  Dr. Michael Prauss, paleontologist at Freie Universitaet Berlin, together with Gerta Keller, and other scientists from Germany and Switzerland, concluded that severe climate changes caused the K-Pg mass extinction. The periods of extreme warming and cooling coupled with rapid sea level changes started about 1 million years before the asteroid impact, which only worsened an already catastrophic climate.

  “The resulting chronic stress, to which of course the meteorite impact was a contributing factor, is likely to have been fundamental to the crisis in the biosphere and finally the mass extinction,” wrote Michael Prauss.

  According to Prauss, the actual asteroid hit took place well before the geochemically and micropaleontologically defined Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. He said that the flora and the fauna recovered after the bolide impact. Prauss supports his claim with the so-called fern spike; this is an increased proportion of fern spores when plants begin to repopulate destroyed ecosystems.

  The asteroid that slammed into the Earth caused only some minor extinction in the zone not very far from the impact crater, but the flora and the fauna recovered very fast. According to this theory, the big rogue asteroid that hit the good, old Earth 300,000 before the demise of the dinosaurs was nothing more than a harmless Cretaceous firecracker, which failed to finish off the Mesozoic world.

  128. Too many carnivores.

  The carnivore dinosaurs became too many and decimated the herbivorous dinosaurs and many other species. Without enough food the carnivores starved to death.

  129. Arsenic poisoning.

  The abnormally high levels of arsenic in the K-Pg boundary levels and in the dinosaur fossils suggest severe arsenic poisoning caused by volcanic eruptions.

  Waters, plants, and soil were poisoned by various chemicals of terrestrial (volcanic) or extraterrestrial origin—comets, asteroids, cosmic dust, or gas clouds.

  130. Spectrum of light changed.

  The Cretaceous mass extinction is a result of change in the balance in the spectrum of light reaching Earth. Slightly more or less ultraviolet light is enough to cause many animals and plants to become extinct.

  131. Earth’s rotation changed.

  On the satellites are acting two forces: gravity, pulling the satellite toward Earth, and centrifugal force, pushing the satellite away. If the balance changes, the satellite would fly away or fall to Earth.

  Sea level is in an equilibrium between the gravity, which pulls the water toward Earth’s center, and the outward centrifugal force, which results from Earth’s rotation. If the equilibrium is disturbed, the rivers, seas, and oceans would spill over, drowning most of the animals and killing off a large part of the marine creatures.

  There would be devastating earthquakes and volcanoes, catastrophic change in climate, the duration of the days and the nights will change, there will begreater range of temperatures over the course of the day, etc.

  According to another theory, the rotational speed of Earth decreased as the diameter of our planet increased, due to cooling of the magma. Thus the weight of everything on our planet increased dramatically since the centripetal force that counteracts the force of gravity decreased, smashing and injuring fatally all large animals.

  Variation of this hypothesis suggests that asteroid impacts increased the speed of rotation of our planet, allowing the Mesozoic animals and plants to grow huge because the centrifugal force counteracted the gravity. When Earth slowed down speed by bolide impacts, all monstrous animals could not survive the increased weight of their own bodies and died off.

  132. Dinosaurs were killed off by aliens.

  In 1957, Jacques Bergier, a science writer, announced on the French television that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by a deliberate supernova explosion caused by an alien super-intelligence that wanted to give the mammals a chance.

  133. Cloud of ice crystals.

  Cirrus clouds are the highest in elevation. They form above 6,100 meters (20,000 feet) and are usually composed of ice crystals because of the very low temperatures.

  The term cirrus is also used for certain interstellar clouds. Interstellar cirrus clouds are composed of tiny ice crystals or other frozen liquids They are huge and range from a few light years to dozens of light years across. Interstellar clouds contain also dust, metals from the platinum group like iridium, organics, etc. Within the clouds there are also huge ice formations with various shapes, mostly loose chunks of solid ice.

  When entering the Solar System, they can cause extinctions in two different ways: 1. Tremendously decreasing the temperatures of Earth’s atmosphere for a brief time period, causing heavy rains, polluted with all sort of interstellar inorganic and organic molecules, several huge ice chunks smashed into the land and the oceans of the planet; 2. The ice crystals reflected the light from our Sun, significantly cooling the climate.

  The Cretaceous hothouse world was very vulnerable to sudden cooling and most of the species died off. Many tropical plants and animals today are totally intolerant of frost. Freezing temperatures even for only a few hours can kill them.

  134. Cold eggs.

  In China and some other places were found a huge number of fossilized unhatched dinosaur eggs from various periods. There are far more unhatched dinosaur eggs than those of reptiles.

  In their article “Unexpected amino acid composition of modern Reptilia and its implica
tions in molecular mechanisms of dinosaur extinction” Wang G.Z., Ma B.G., Yang Y., Zhang H.Y., published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications in 2005, proposed a possible molecular mechanism for dinosaur extinction. They have analyzed the amino acid compositions of many animals and have found that the amino acids of modern reptiles, considered dinosaur relatives, are strikingly different from those of other classes of creatures.

  This hypothesis suggests that the dinosaur proteins were particularly sensitive to low temperatures because of the types of amino acids of their bodies and eggs.

  This proposal also explains why there are the large numbers of unhatched dinosaur eggs from previous periods during minor cold spells.

  The dinosaurs could not sit on their eggs to warm them like many other animals, and their highly-sensitive-to-low-temperatures eggs could not hatch. The end of the dinosaurs started with their cold eggs.

  135. Methane explosion.

  Sometimes stagnant oceans could be extremely dangerous and cause prodigious catastrophes because they are loaded with huge amounts of dissolved methane and other gases.

  Gregory Ryskin, associate professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches chemical engineeringpublished in hisarticle “Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions,” Geology magazine, 2003, a theory about the possibility methane eruptions and explosions to cause mass extinctions.

  He wrote, “I explore the possibility that mass extinction can be caused by an extremely fast, explosive release of dissolved methane (and other dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide) that accumulated in the oceanic water masses prone to stagnation and anoxia…Terrestrial extinctions are caused by explosions and conflagrations that follow the massive release of methane (the air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%) and by the eruption-triggered floods.”