this whole thing about how a one mile wide asteroid can somehow send dust into the air and cause a world wide ice age and now cause a planetary fire is such total crap
More:
*********************************EXCERPT**********************************************
Hypothermania says:
DaveF says:
March 27, 2013 at 5:46 am
So what killed those dinosaurs that lived in the sea?
Burning trees caused CO2 levels to increase, which caused sea levels to rise dramatically and they all died from vertigo.
Roughly the same as setting off 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT. Count dem zeroes, that's 100 million megatons.
Add to all that energy dumped instantaneously into the atmosphere and near space the intrinsic heat of the now exposed yellow-hot mantle.
As an added bonus, it was an edge of a shallow sea strike. Where does the ocean go? Well, after the big splash, it tries to refill the crater.
Imagine that, pouring an ocean of cold water into a 10,000 square mile 2400°F furnace. That's a recipe for steam-cleaning half a planet!
Do you think that all that water rushing into the crater would be crystal clear, or do you think it might be full of silt and sand scoured from the sea floor? Would the grit passively settle to the crater floor or be blasted into the are with a 100 mile wide jet of live steam?
How high would world humidity be after the month of so of an entire ocean finally won the battle for the crater floor?
The atmosphere would be utterly saturated with water vapor, thick clouds and dust. Torrential rains where it's warm enough, sleet, hail, and snow everywhere else. And with that unbroken cloud cover reflecting the sun's heat back into space, the warm areas are pretty small.
Then things get worse. The Yucatan was covered by about a mile and a half of limestone, nature's carbon dioxide storage medium. the heat and pressure of the impact broke the bonds holding the carbon in the calcium carbonate, besides a supervolcano of live steam, the blast released a vast cloud of that most evil of chemicals, CO2!
I'll get to the bad part shortly.
Limestone also contains vast quantities of sulfur (ever drink well water in Florida?) That sulfur gets vaporized and oxidized and hydrated into sulfuric acid.
Now the bad part.
All the air within 300 or so miles of the impact was heated and shocked and zapped by ultraviolet and electrical discharges so hard that most of the oxygen and nitrogen were ionized, generating vast quantities of oxides of nitrogen, which combined with all that water vapor to form nitric acid.
All that rain and snow? Full of carbonic acid, sulfuric acid and nitric acid.
All in all, it was a pretty bad day to be a dinosaur...
On the bright side, after a couple years of dirty rain and snow, the cloud cover clears. Now all we have is an atmosphere with a huge residual eeeeevil CO2 concentration.
Things get warm and dank. The land has a fresh new layer of mineral rich ejecta, and more minerals have been freed up by all the acids unlocking them from solid rock. The atmosphere is full of that essential plant nutrient, CO2.
It would have been a virtual garden of Eden for anything that managed to survive.