Rock layers challenge asteroid theory, according to report in ScienceDaily 28April 2009.
The popular belief that dinosaurs (and many other plants and animals) suddenly died out after an asteroid crashed into earth 65 million years ago has been challenged by scientists. The asteroid impact is claimed to have marked the end of the Cretaceous period and the abrupt transition to the geological Tertiary period, and is referred to as the K-T boundary. The asteroid impact caused deposits of spherules in the sediments around the site where it landed.
Gerta Kellerof Princeton University in New Jersey, and Thierry Adatte of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, now claims the asteroid impact “predates the K-T boundary by as much as 300,000 years.” They studied sediments above and below the asteroid spherules. They found “52 species present in sediments below the impact spherule layer, and counted all 52 still present in layers above the spherules.”
Keller commented: “We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact.” Their study involved sandstone deposits at El Penon and other sites in Mexico. Keller said: “we know that between four and nine metres of sediments were deposited at about two to three centimetres per thousand years after the impact. The mass extinction level can be seen in the sediments above this interval.”
Editorial Comment: This is not the first report of Dinosaurs above the KT boundary – particularly the Triceratops in Montana, but there is one thing in this report that most will miss, so let’s do some quick calculations on the rock layer central to this debate. This is claimed to have formed at a rate of “two to three centimetres per thousand years”. That’s between 0.02 and 0.03 mm per year (approximately 0.01 inches).
According to the International Sand Collectors Society, “sand is an unconsolidated (loose), rounded to angular rock fragment or mineral grain having a diameter in the range of 1/16 to 2 mm (0.0025 to 0.08 in.).” Therefore, if the scientists in the study above are correct, the sandstone was laid down at the rate of less than the thickness of one sand grain per year. We find it hard to believe that the weather could be so quiet as to allow sand grains to collect in one place at this rate for one year, let alone 300,000years, and in all that time erosion did not remove the sediments faster than they were being deposited.
What wonderful faith evolutionary geologists have, and what a reminder of one of our favourite neo-catastrophist’s constant comment, “If one attempts to calculate rates of sedimentation in the past, the results are usually ludicrous.” Derek Ager The New Catastrophism, p1, Cambridge University Press, 1993
Evidence News, 6 May 2009
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