[SunkenCiv]

Thanks, great pictures as always.

[1999 -- The letter of rejection from Nature for the following article is dated August 28, 1968. At the time most earth scientists would not even accept the fact that meteorites regularly impacted the earth. For example, Barringer Crater in Arizona was still thought by many to be of volcanic origin, as well as the craters on the moon. Bob Dietz had just published his work on shatter cones but I wouldn't say that had been generally accepted. There was not even general agreement on sea floor spreading and plate tectonics outside the radical few at Scripps, Woods Hole, and related institutions.]

Possible Formation of the Guatemala Basin by the Impact of an Extraterrestrial Body
by Charles E. Corry and Miller L. Bell

The earth must be as frequently cratered per unit area as the moon. By a relative cross section argument, more than 13 times the number of craters the size of the maria on the moon exist, or existed, on the earth. Whether such events occur with sufficient frequency in recent geologic time to provide tangible evidence today of such cratering is uncertain. From the arguments set forth, and the continuing discovery of meteorite craters on the continents (Short, 1966, Baldwin, 1963, Dietz, 1961, and Prouty, 1952) it seems likely that the importance of the effect of extraterrestrial bodies impacting the earth has been, at least, underestimated (the Alverez's hypothesis concerning the end of the dinosaurs by such a mechanism was more than a decade in the future). Certainly there is as much evidence at present to support our hypothesis for the formation of the Guatemala Basin as other hypotheses advanced to explain the low heat flow found in this basin.

With the tests for shock processes advanced by Short (1966), our hypothesis should be capable of field verification or rejection.

New Dino Species Found on Dusty Shelf
by John Pickrell
July 10, 2003

The two-ton (1.8 metric ton) species of sauropod, previously unknown to science, is the oldest known ancestor to lumbering herbivorous giants such as the well-known brachiosaurs of the Jurassic... The 215 million-year-old specimen, named Antetonitrus ingenipes, is significantly older than any previously known sauropod, a class of plant-eating dinosaurs with four legs and long necks... While Antetonitrus was larger than any land animal living today and its contemporaries, it pales in comparison to the monumental dinosaurs that would follow millions of years later.

New Extinction Clues Point to Deep Impact
by Paul Recer
May 10, 2001

New evidence shows that an extinction event in which more than half of all Earth species died 200 million years ago happened quickly, possibly as a result of an impact from outer space. The extinction, at the boundary of the Triassic and Jurassic periods of geologic history, is similar in its suddenness to two extinction events that have been linked to space rocks' impacts on the Earth. Researchers analyzing deposits from a rock formation on a remote beach front in Canada found evidence of a sharp shift in organic carbon levels at precisely the point in time that the Triassic-Jurassic extinction occurred. This is the first time scientists have found a clear carbon signature for what is called the TJ event, said Peter D. Ward, a researcher at the University of Washington... Similar evidence has been found for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, and for the much earlier Permian extinction 250 million years ago that killed 90 percent of all species... If the researchers find evidence that a space rock impact caused the TJ extinction, it will mean that three of the five major extinctions in the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth are linked to the impact of asteroids or comets... Ward said that no impact crater on Earth has been shown to have a proven link to the TJ extinction event, although the Manicougan Crater in Quebec is considered a candidate. That crater was caused by a space impact, but it has been dated at 214 million years, well before the TJ event.

[Fred Nerks]

Possible Formation of the Guatemala Basin by the Impact of an Extraterrestrial Body

by Charles E. Corry and Miller L. Bell

Charles E. Corry

Achievements

Overturned paradigm that had existed for over 150 years regarding galvanic current flow in ore bodies; discovery that ore minerals are commonly ferroelectrics and that ore bodies behave as a polarized dielectric medium, or solid plasma, in electrical surveys; development of the controlled-source audiomagnetotelluric (CSAMT) method for electrical exploration; field and theoretical studies of magmatic intrusions; terrestrial heat flow studies in the North Pacific, coordination of the hydrographic program of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, relational database design and data modeling...

Thanks!

discovery that ore minerals are commonly ferroelectrics and that ore bodies behave as a polarized dielectric medium, or solid plasma, in electrical surveys...

Electric Universe! Did you tell Swordmaker?