Wow.... interesting.
So, this "global warming" could just continue to be after-effects of that event. I supppose women/minorities were impacted mostly back then.
"Distant Star explodes ... women, minorities and North America hit hardest"?
> ... a key piece of evidence for the supernova is a set of
> 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks riddled with tiny craters.
Seems a bit of a stretch. Plus, the radiation alone might
be sufficiently fatal.
However, I fully expect that an SN will at some time be
linked to a historical catastrophe. And other SNs are
still out there. Perhaps some have already exploded and
are sending nasty stuff our way.
Planetary defense is possible for asteroids and comets.
I'm not sure what we can do about SNs.
Wow, the town I grew up in is in the news!!
Occam's Razor says there's a simpler explanation. The Indians ate the mammoths, the mastodons, the giant sloths and armadillos. The sabertooth tigers starved. You don't need superheated hurricanes, supernovas firing interstellar shrapnel, etc. And how come this supernova weather didn't hit Asia or Europe or Africa?
It's Bush's fault.
The article didn't say what part of the heavens the supernova was supposed to have occurred. They usually say "supernova in constellation so and so." Maybe they said it somewhere, does anybody know?
Whatever caused the craters had to have been traveling around 6,214 miles per second,
Don't you just love that precision! About 41,000 years ago but exactly 6214 miles per second! Ah, why can't these stupid "journalists" just leave the speeds in kilometers in the first place?
Thank you! Finally a theory that fits observations! I'll watch developments on this closely. Great catch!
How would small animals, man included, know to do this? Would there have been some type of visible physical manifestation of this event?
If a 10 solar mass star's entire substance were distrubuted evenly over the surface of a sphere 250 light-years across, you get (2 x 10^31 kg) / 4pi*(2.37 x 10^15 km)^2 = 0.283 kg/km^2 or about a quarter milligram for every square meter.
In reality, most of that is hydrogen and helium, not heavy metals, it won't all come at once, and not all of it will escape from the supernova's core's gravity.
Which is more believable, all the large North American mammals were killed by a quarter milligram per square meter of material spread out over years, or the arrival of humans on the continent?
Then test it. Until then, it's just an educated guess. Much like many scientific theories.
Great. Now someone will file a class action suit on behalf of the extinct mammoths for reparations, claiming Bush and Halliburton caused the supernova.
Bush's Fault
Hey ... if Superman can get here that way, so can a comet-like body.
Does anybody find it ironic that the theory of global catastrophy caused by flaming meteors and stoney comets was presented by a fellow named 'Firestone'? ...and co-founded as being the cause of destruction in the western hemisphere from a vanAllen belt like penetration by a geologist named Allen West?