Image:header-trans
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Backpedalling Evolutionists 2
or
The Great Dinosaur Extinction Cover-up 2

OK this is a follow up page on something I feel that the evolutionists are really trying to backpedal on.

So here's a really quick revision and update about what is going on here...

The general perception with the public regarding the extinction of the dinosaurs is that they were wiped out by a meteorite impact. This theory has inarguably become the most famous and highly publicized cause for the disappearance of the species 65 million years ago. Its popularity has caused it to be universally accepted as the only viable theory to explain the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
https://hoopermuseum.carleton.ca/saleem/meteor.htm
More recent docs use 66 Ma.


The Meteor
The Meteor
The Meteor
Point of impact: The Chicxulub crater at the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

In 1980, a team of researchers led by Nobel prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, and chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Vaughn Michel discovered that sedimentary layers found all over the world at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary, formerly called Cretaceous–Tertiary or K–T boundary) contain a concentration of iridium hundreds of times greater than normal. Iridium is extremely rare in the Earth's crust because it is very dense and has the affinity for iron that characterizes the siderophile elements (see Goldschmidt classification), and therefore most of it sank into the Earth's core while the earth was still molten. The Alvarez team suggested that an asteroid struck the earth at the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary.
http://web.archive.org/web/20201108005220/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis

"The Alvarezes along with Asaro and Michel published their seminal 1980 paper" “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction” about "the demise of the dinosaurs" but gave no information about a crater. This changed with "the discovery in 1991 of the scene of the crime – the Chicxulub crater, a 180-kilometer-wide, 20-kilometer-deep impact crater off the northern coast of the Yucatan peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico that is buried beneath a kilometer of Tertiary carbonates. The discovery of this impact site answered critics who’d been demanding to know: If an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, where’s the crater?"
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/03/09/alvarez-theory-on-dinosaur/


Image:Approximate location of the Chicxulub impact crater, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.

Approximate location of the Chicxulub impact crater, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.

Image:Approximate location of the Chicxulub impact crater, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.

Approximate location of the Chicxulub impact crater, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.

Image:Approximate location of the Chicxulub impact crater, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.

Approximate location of the Chicxulub impact crater, in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.

Unfortunately the devastation a large meteor like this could cause would do a lot more damage than just the dinosaurs going extinct. When the meteor theory was being considered various studies were done using massive supercomputers to model the effect of the impact. The suggested scenarios were quite horrific.


Image:Sequoia supercomputer
Image:Sequoia supercomputer
Image:Sequoia supercomputer
Example supercomputer: Sequoia at National Nuclear Security Administration 2012.

we concluded that the most probable impactor was a fast asteroid or a long-period comet with energy between 1.3x1024 J and 5.8x1025 J, mass between 1.0x1015 kg and 4.6x1017 kg, and diameter between 10.6 km and 80.9 km.
Assessments of the energy, mass and size of the Chicxulub Impactor
Hector Javier Durand-Manterola and Guadalupe Cordero-Tercero.[1]

Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth's crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, ...

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

Then acid rain, formed from the nitrous oxide and sulfates clogging the atmosphere, began to hammer down on the surface, killing plants and animals and even dissolving rocks. This rain would have been as corrosive as battery acid and its most devastating effect would have been to destroy the shells of small marine organisms. p.165.
Flying Dinosaurs: How fearsome reptiles became birds, John Pickrell, 2014.

The researchers say it is the first direct evidence that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago coincided with a sharp drop in the pH levels of the oceans — which indicates a rise in ocean acidity.
“The ocean acidification we observe could easily have been the trigger for mass extinction in the marine realm,” said senior author Pincelli Hull, assistant professor of geology and geophysics at Yale.
https://news.yale.edu/2019/10/21/mystery-solved-ocean-acidity-last-mass-extinction

A study of boron isotopes in the tests of foraminifera that lived deep in the oceans and near their surface just after the K-Pg boundary event has revealed that ocean water suddenly became more acidic (Henehan, M.J. and 13 others 2019. Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Online; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1905989116).
https://earthlogs.org/2019/10/25/what-followed-the-k-pg-extinction-event/

The effects of the sulphuric acid on the climate was so severe that the computer simulations found it would have taken at least 30 years for the global climate to recover.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/dinosaurs-extinction-simulation

But things have changed. One of the original Chicxulub quotes I had used was:

The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 11-81 kilometers (6.8-50.3 mi), and delivered an estimated energy of 21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs (between 1.3x1024 and 5.8x1025 joules, or 1.3-58 yottajoules). For comparison, this is ~100 million times the energy released by the Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear device ("H-bomb") that remains the most powerful human-made explosive ever detonated, which released 210 petajoules (2.1x1017 joules, or 50 megatons TNT).
http://web.archive.org/web/20211228051109/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
Note: see Reference 1.

Before continuing on, this old quote gives the kinetic energy range from the two guys from Mexico as "an estimated energy of 21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs". But this was not stated in their paper which this quote is referring to. But it can be approximated by using the following:

The following is a summary of the features of the atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) dropped on Hiroshima. It has been estimated that it was equivalent to 16 KT of TNT (trinitrotoluene, explosive). Only about 860 g of the 70 kg of U-235 contained in the bomb was thought to have exploded. The energy released was 6.3 × 1013 J (63 TJ) (Little Boy, Wikipedia; Los Alamos Report (1985)).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299686845_Devastation_Caused_by_the_Atomic_Bombs_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

And using their estimated range of "energy between 1.3x1024 J and 5.8x1025 J" we obtain approximately 20.6 to 920.6 or 21 to 921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs as stated above.

However, checking the wikipedia quote in June 2022, I found this had been replaced by:

It was formed when a large asteroid, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in diameter, struck the Earth.

The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 100 teratons of TNT*, more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220616030918/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
* but see Mar 2023 Backpedalling update below.

And some more similar style quotes where the destructive power of the meteor has been downsized by simply making the asteroid smaller or not as fast:

Even before the asteroid hit, it was primed for decimation, colliding with Earth at the most destructive angle, according to a 2020 study published in Nature Communications. The asteroid was about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) in diameter and was traveling about 27,000 mph (43,000 km/h) when it created a 124-mile-wide (200 km) scar on the planet's surface, said Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, who led the study. More importantly, the asteroid struck the planet at about 60 degrees above the horizon. This angle was particularly destructive because it allowed the asteroid's impact to eject a large amount of dust and aerosols into the atmosphere.
https://www.livescience.com/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-struck-earth

"The impact simulations shown in Figs. 2 and 3 employ an impact speed of 12 km/s, only slightly larger than the minimum possible speed—Earth’s escape velocity of 11.2 km/s. While these results are likely to be representative of the ~25% of all impacts that occur at speeds below 15 km/s, we also conducted another suite of simulations with a more probable impact speed of 20 km/s (close to Earth’s mean and median asteroid impact speed) ...

In summary, our numerical simulations of oblique Chicxulubscale impacts appear to be most consistent with the internal structure of the Chicxulub crater for a steeply inclined impact angle of 45–60° to the horizontal."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7251121/pdf/41467_2020_Article_15269.pdf

Note this paper really had more to do with the impact angle and not the velocity or size of the impactor. Though looking at the impact simulations they have used two impactor sizes: 17 km and 21 km diameters.

And bear in mind that some older quotes I have used [and still use] give higher velocities:

A comet or an asteroid—we aren't sure which—collided with the Earth, hitting what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. It was about six miles (ten kilometers) wide, or about the size of Mount Everest. It was probably moving at a speed of around 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 kilometers per hour), more than a hundred times faster than a jet airliner. When it slammed into our planet, it hit with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, somewhere in the vicinity of a billion nuclear bombs' worth of energy. It plowed some twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) through the crust and into the mantle, leaving a crater that was over 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide. p.315.
The RISE and FALL of the DINOSAURS
A New History of Their Lost World, STEVE BRUSATTE. 2018.

This comet is 10 kilometres in diameter, taller than Mt Everest or larger than the Martian moon Deimos. This harbinger of destruction is travelling at a speed of more than 100000 kilometres per hour and its energy of motion has the destructive force of 100 million hydrogen bombs. p.163.
Flying Dinosaurs: How fearsome reptiles became birds, John Pickrell, 2014.

So what was the driving point here? Why make the meteor smaller? Or slower? Well with the original destructive scenarios some evolutionists could see there were some very serious problems:

Birds, tortoises, and mammals live on land and breathe air: the evidence from the K-T boundary shows that they survived the K-T boundary event. Therefore they and the air they breathed weren't set on broil for several hours. To put it simply, these scenarios did not happen.
History of Life, Richard Cowen, 2000.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen2b.html

How did birds survive while dinosaurs did not? ... Even a sudden storm or a slightly severe winter can cause high mortality among bird populations. Yet an impact scenario, according to its enthusiasts, includes "a nightmare of environmental disasters, including storms, tsunamis, cold and darkness, greenhouse warming, acid rains and global fires." There must be some explanation for the survival of birds, turtles, and crocodiles through any catastrophe of this scale, or else the catastrophe models are wrong.
History of Life, Richard Cowen, 2000.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen3b.html

Some critics, including paleontologist Robert Bakker, argue that such an impact would have killed frogs as well as dinosaurs, yet the frogs survived the extinction event.
http://web.archive.org/web/20211228051109/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

Amphibians breathe through their porous skins and are sensitive to slight changes in the acidity of their watery habitat. Even now, the slightly more acidic conditions of lakes and ponds due to human-induced acid rain are causing frogs and salamanders to die out rapidly. If the entire earth had been subjected to a huge acid bath, there simply would not be a frog or salamander alive on the earth today. p.38.
After the Dinosaurs, Donald R. Prothero, 2006.


Image:Species that should be extinct! Birds Image:Species that should be extinct! Tortoises Image:Species that should be extinct! Mammals
Image:Species that should be extinct! Crocodiles Image:Species that should be extinct! Frogs Image:Species that should be extinct! Salamanders Image:Species that should be extinct! Turtles

Some species that should be extinct!

Image:Species that should be extinct! Birds Image:Species that should be extinct! Tortoises Image:Species that should be extinct! Mammals
Image:Species that should be extinct! Crocodiles Image:Species that should be extinct! Frogs Image:Species that should be extinct! Salamanders Image:Species that should be extinct! Turtles

Some species that should be extinct!

Image:Species that should be extinct! Birds Image:Species that should be extinct! Frogs Image:Species that should be extinct! Salamanders
Image:Species that should be extinct! Crocodiles Image:Species that should be extinct! Tortoises Image:Species that should be extinct! Turtles
Image:Species that should be extinct! Mammals

Some species that should be extinct!

So in the face of all of this what's an evolutionist to do? Well one of them did suggest a way out of this mess:

the hellish scenarios of the impact and its effects on the earth must be greatly exaggerated, because so many animals that could not survive such conditions (such as amphibians, crocodiles, insects, and freshwater fish) did survive. pp38, 39.
After the Dinosaurs, Donald R. Prothero, 2006.
Bold emphasis supplied.

In other words, tone it down, the destruction which was caused by the meteor just wasn't as bad as we thought. And this does appear to be the direction they have taken. But... and here's the big question...

Guilty or not?

Are they justified in doing this? Perhaps with more recent studies they found that they did not get it right originally and that the asteroid was a bit smaller or slower.

And so all the computer simulated destructive scenarios were fanciful and made for great reading but sadly did not stack up to newer evidence.

It's an interesting question and one we can investigate here. In short are the evolutionists in the clear or have they been caught out doing what we could call a real classic case of backpedalling? At the astronomical level! That's a really good question. Guilty or not?

Trying the new values

OK so let's try some of these new values and see how they stack up. Do we have a genuine case of backpedalling or not?

We can test all the new values using a site I found for crater formation given size of impactor, density, velocity and impact angle.
Asteroid Impact Crater Calculator.[2]

I used this site to put together a page about the impactor. So finishing that I could work on this. Actually I found the answer came out the same, no matter the velocity or size of the impactor. It'll be the same here so I already know what the answer is but will step through this anyway. Why not?

What have we got? The new studies suggest diameters of 10 km, 12 km, 17 km, or 21 km. With velocity: 43,000 km/hr [approx 11.94 km/sec], 43,200 km/hr [12 km/sec], or 72,000 km/hr [20 km/sec].

Though some of the old quotes did have a 10 km diameter they were all higher velocities. So along with lower velocities we can also check the 10 km diameter. The two guys from Mexico had the diameter range starting just a little higher than that.

We need only try the low values, the others don't matter. So we have a diameter of 10 km, and velocity 12 km/sec. OK I ignored 11.94 it's closenuff to 12.

The constant in all of this is the crater. So we work to a fixed crater size and everything falls out with that. The software requires densities and some new information gives:

careful consideration of the geochemical evidence strongly favors a CM or CR carbonaceous chondrite, and rules out a cometary impactor.

the impactor must be a CM or CR chondrite, and this makes asteroids plausible
Desch et al.
"The Chicxulub impactor: comet or asteroid?"

And on a page about meteorite densities I found the following:

All densities are measured in grams per cubic centimetre. (g/cm3)

Carbonaceous Chondrites:
CI 2.11
CM 2.12 (± 0.26)
CR 3.1
http://meteorites.com.au/odds&ends/density.html

We will also use 60° as the impact angle as given above and try both densities 2.12 and 3.1 with a diameter of 10 km and velocity 12 km/sec.

So now we only need the crater diameter. There's not great unanimity on this but one doc I found suggests 170 km and another paper makes mention of this so will use it:

CHICXULUB CRATER SIZE AND STRUCTURE AS REVEALED BY HORIZONTAL BOUGUER GRAVITY GRADIENTS AND CENOTE DISTRIBUTION; A.R. Hildebrand, et at.
The size of the Chicxulub crater, Yucatan, Mexico is currently in dispute with diameter estimates ranging from 170km upwards of 300 km ...
No concentric gradient features were found at distances >85 km radius. ...
The cenotes' distribution does not reveal any concentric structure at radii >85 km; ...
This terrace width satisfies the relationship defined by lunar craters for a crater of 170 km diameter
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc1995/pdf/1302.pdf

This document gives a footnote on each page stating "Lunar and Planetary Institute Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System" which does suggest this document carries a reasonable amount of weight on this topic.

Now it's the destruction that the meteor caused that supposedly the evolutionists are trying to downplay and one of the original quotes suggested it's in the range "21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs". The new quote gave "more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan."

"21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs" is a lot "more than 4.5 billion ..." So who's right?

Let's try the new suggested values and see what we get.

Meteor densities: 2.12 and 3.1 g/cc; diameter: 10 km; velocity: 12 km/sec; angle: 60°
Target crater diameter: 170 km.

So what's going on here...
For diameter 10 km we enter this amount and vary the velocity till we obtain the target crater diameter [or close just above].
For velocity 12 km/sec we enter this amount and vary the asteroid diameter until we again obtain the target crater diameter [or just above].


We obtain:

Diameter: 10 km
CM 2.12 g/cc
Gives Velocity 125.3 km/sec, Mass 1.11x10^15 kg, KE 8.71x10^24 Joules, 138 billion Hiroshima A bombs
CR 3.1 g/cc
Gives Velocity 103.6 km/sec, Mass 1.62x10^15 kg, KE 8.71x10^24 Joules, 138 billion Hiroshima A bombs

Velocity: 12 km/sec
CM 2.12 g/cc
Gives diameter 47.76 km, Mass 1.21x10^17 kg, KE 8.71x10^24 Joules, 138 billion Hiroshima A bombs
CR 3.1 g/cc
Gives diameter 42.08 km, Mass 1.21x10^17 kg, KE 8.71x10^24 Joules, 138 billion Hiroshima A bombs

There are problems with both of these estimates, one serious and the other just a bit close.

The case for a 10 km diameter is not possible as the velocity required is way above the acceptable range given by the two guys from Mexico:

Steel (1998) obtained an estimation of the range of velocities for bodies that cross Earth's orbit. For asteroids the interval is between 12.6 km s-1 and 40.7 km s-1. This result is based on measurements of the velocities of the asteroids that cross Earth's orbit.[1]

The case for a 12 km/sec velocity is just below the range. It's close so we could allow it.

But no matter, all the calculations returned the same destructive energy required to form a 170 km wide crater: 138 billion Hiroshima A bombs!

Every calculation gave the same result. And this value is in the range suggested by the two guys from Mexico:

"21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs"[1]

So the new quote suggestion of "4.5 billion" is a clear case of downgrading.

And our conclusion?

Image:BUSTED!!

The evolutionists have definitely been caught backpedalling. It can now be considered official!

Backpedalling Evolutionists
Image:Backpedalling
Image:Backpedalling
Image:Backpedalling
Man at front: "Hey, you at the end! You're facing the wrong way!"
Biker at other end: "I'm an evolutionist!"

Postscript Section

Mar 2023 Backpedalling update:

The latest wikipedia quote now gives

The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second (12 mi/s). The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ).
http://web.archive.org/web/20230308222229/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

OK need to convert this to Joules & Hiro.bombs.
zetta Z prefix for 10^21:

zetta Z 10^21 1000000000000000000000 adopted 1991
tera T 10^12 1000000000000 adopted 1960
milli m 10-3 0.001 adopted 1795

milligram of TNT mg nanoton of TNT nt 4.184 J or 4.184 joules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

So 300 ZJ = 300x10^21 J = 3x10^23 J = 30x10^22J / 6.3x10^13J/Hb = approx 4.76x10^9Hb = approx 4.8 billion Hiro.bombs.
using 6.3x10^13 J for 1 Hiroshima A bomb.

Check:
72 teratonnes of TNT

1 gm = 1000 mg
1 metric tonne = 1000 kilograms =10^6 gm = 10^6x10^3 mg = 10^9 mg

Then
72 teratonnes TNT = 72x10^12x10^9 mg TNT = 72x10^21x4.184 J = approx 301.25x10^21 J / 6.3x10^13J/1Hb = approx 47.82x10^8 Hb = approx 4.8x10^9 Hb = 4.8 billion Hb.

By this, 100 teratonnes TNT would give approx 6.6 billion Hiroshima bombs. So neither of the quotes seem to add up. Though it is "more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan." [I got 6.6 but now being downgraded to 4.8]

However, if we use the old quote of June 2022 suggesting "The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 100 teratons of TNT, more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan"
then applying this to the new quote of March 2023: "72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ)"
would suggest a downgrade from 4.5 billion to 3.24 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

Note: this is probably a bit wonky as we have the quotes mixing teratons and teratonnes. Enjoy!

Though my calculations above return higher values, this is how it looks, apart from the muddling. It's still definitely a downgrade. Again. The backpedalling has continued!

Apr 2023 Backpedalling update:

The backpedalling continues! Just found [as at 9 Apr]

In March 2010, an international panel of scientists endorsed the asteroid hypothesis, specifically the Chicxulub impact, as being the cause of the extinction. A team of 41 scientists reviewed 20 years of scientific literature and in so doing also ruled out other theories such as massive volcanism. They had determined that a space rock 10–15 km (6–9 mi) in diameter hurtled into earth at Chicxulub. For comparison, the Martian moon Phobos has a diameter of 22 km (14 mi), and Mount Everest is just under 9 km (5.6 mi). The collision would have released the same energy as 100,000,000 megatonnes of TNT (4.2×1023 J), over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230315003850/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis

So now it's just "over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki"?

Let the games begin!

Strange pussyfooting going on here

The above wikipedia quote from June 2022 gave:

It was formed when a large asteroid, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in diameter, struck the Earth.

The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 100 teratons of TNT, more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220616030918/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

OK back to the table on units we find:
mega M 106 1000000 1873
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

So "100,000,000 megatonnes" TNT gives 10^8 x 10^6 tonnes TNT = 10^14 tonnes TNT and quoted as approx 4.2×1023 J.

Again we can check this:

10^14 tonnes TNT = 10^14 x 10^9 mg TNT = 10^23 mg TNT = 10^23 x 4.184 J = 4.184 x 10^23 J. OK the quote has this rounded to 4.2. So far so good. Now things get a little wonky.

The quote from above has "100 teratons of TNT" which gives 100 x 10^12 tons TNT = 10^14 tons TNT.

So which is it? 10^14 tonnes TNT OR 10^14 tons TNT? They're not the same.

1 Ton = 0.90718474 Metric Tons
https://www.calculateme.com/weight/tons/to-metric-tons/

They will need to make up their minds on this one.

Note: since they did arrive at approx 4.2 x 10^23 J, we can conclude the quote is tonnes, not tons, as we obtained this value from 10^14 tonnes TNT, not 10^14 tons TNT.

Just plain sloppy

More interestingly, the above quote I found in April gave:

"The collision would have released the same energy as 100,000,000 megatonnes of TNT (4.2×1023 J), over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

but working this through [using the more correct value 4.184 instead of 4.2] we can easily find:

4.184x10^23 J / 6.3x10^13J/1Hb = approx 41.84/6.3 x 10^9 Hb = approx 6.6 billion Hiroshima Atomic bombs.
This value appears in one of my line workings above.

Nevertheless, to have the quote say "over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" is just plain sloppy.

Again, to say "over a billion times the energy" when a simple calculation shows that it is approx 6.6 billion just begs the question what are they afraid of?
6.6 billion is a lot more than just "over a billion".

So sure, this is a clear cut case of backpedalling and now we can say it is also a great example of pussyfooting.


REFERENCES


Note: when I mention the extinction of the dinosaurs this is not making a clear distinction. By the extinction of the dinosaurs I mean in general the non-avian dinosaurs.

Ma - million years ago.
Ba - billion years ago.

K-T, K-Pg boundary, extinction event
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event (also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction) was a sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, approximately 66 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event

Chicxulub
pronounced [and my choice of a few]:
"Chik-shoo-loob"

Experts Reaffirm Asteroid Impact Caused Mass Extinction
MARCH 4, 2010
Some scientists have suggested that the Chicxulub (“chik-shoo-loob”) impact in Mexico ...
https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2010/03/experts-reaffirm-asteroid-impact-caused-mass-extinction/

Chicxulub impact site
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub_impact_-_artist_impression.jpg
This painting by Donald E. Davis depicts an asteroid slamming into tropical, shallow seas of the sulfur-rich Yucatan Peninsula in what is today southeast Mexico. The aftermath of this immense asteroid collision, which occurred approximately 65 million years ago, is believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. The impact spewed hundreds of billions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere, producing a worldwide blackout and freezing temperatures which persisted for at least a decade. Shown in this painting are pterodactyls, flying reptiles with wingspans of up to 50 feet, gliding above low tropical clouds.
Author: Donald E. Davis
Public domain

Meteor Crater Location in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.
"North America laea location map"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_America_laea_location_map.svg
Attribution: Uwe Dedering
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

1. The two guys from Mexico:

Because the interval of time that separates us from the formation of Chicxulub is so large, the evidence that could help to reconstruct impactor features are few. The most obvious is the diameter of the crater, which is between 180 and 200 km (Schulte et al., 2010). With these extreme values and equations (2.1.2), (2.2.2), (2.3.2), (2.4.10) we can estimate the energy of the impactor.

We considered the density of the projectile as 1650 kg m-3 for comets (Greenberg, 1998), 3400 kg m-3 for stony asteroids (Wilkison and Robinson, 2000), and 8000 kg m-3 for iron asteroids (Hills and Goda, 1993). ... Steel (1998) obtained an estimation of the range of velocities for bodies that cross Earth's orbit. For asteroids the interval is between 12.6 km s-1 and 40.7 km s-1. This result is based on measurements of the velocities of the asteroids that cross Earth's orbit.

The range for comets is between 16 km s-1 and 73 km s-1.

we concluded that the most probable impactor was a fast asteroid or a long-period comet with energy between 1.3x1024 J and 5.8x1025 J, mass between 1.0x1015 kg and 4.6x1017 kg, and diameter between 10.6 km and 80.9 km.
Assessments of the energy, mass and size of the Chicxulub Impactor
Hector Javier Durand-Manterola and Guadalupe Cordero-Tercero
Departamento de Ciencias Espaciales, Instituto de Geofísica, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México
https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6391

Suggested dates to 2014 and have a reference dated 2013.

2. Asteroid Impact Crater Calculator
http://convertalot.com/asteroid_impact_calculator.html
This JavaScript program (by Stephen R. Schmitt) calculates the effects of the impact of an object hitting the earth. It was adapted from a BASIC program from the Astronomical Computing column of Sky & Telescope, November 1996.

Devastation Caused by the Atomic Bombs: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 2014
DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-38727-2_5
In book: Hiroshima to Fukushima (pp.35-37)
Author: Eiichiro Ochiai, Juniata College
Abstract and Figures
Now, let’s go back to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The following is a summary of the features of the atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) dropped on Hiroshima. It has been estimated that it was equivalent to 16 KT of TNT (trinitrotoluene, explosive). Only about 860 g of the 70 kg of U-235 contained in the bomb was thought to have exploded. The energy released was 6.3 × 1013 J (63 TJ) (Little Boy, Wikipedia; Los Alamos Report (1985)).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299686845_Devastation_Caused_by_the_Atomic_Bombs_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Old Bicycles
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_bicycles1.jpg
Image by LoopZilla
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license.

Supercomputer: Sequoia at National Nuclear Security Administration 2012
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sequoia6.1000pix.jpg
IBM Sequoia
Attribution: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Public domain

Bird pics
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net
Public domain

Frog
Temporal range:
Early Jurassic - Present, 200-0 Ma
A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (literally without tail in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" appeared in the early Triassic of Madagascar, but molecular clock dating suggests their origins may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago.
They are also seen as environmental bellwethers, with declines in frog populations often viewed as early warning signs of environmental damage.
For the skin to serve as a respiratory organ, it must remain moist. This makes frogs susceptible to various substances they may encounter in the environment, some of which may be toxic and can dissolve in the water film and be passed into their bloodstream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Litoria_phyllochroa.JPG
Attribution: Froggydarb
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Crocodile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nile_croc_couple_690V1510_-_Flickr_-_Lip_Kee.jpg
Attribution: Lip Kee from Singapore, Republic of Singapore
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Platypus + Echidna pics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monotreme_collage.jpg
Four of the five extant monotreme species: platypus (top-left), short-beaked echidna (top-right), western long-beaked echidna (bottom-left), and replica eastern long-beaked echidna (bottom-right).
Constituent files:
File:Platypus BrokenRiver QLD Australia.jpg
File:Long-beakedEchidna.jpg
File:Echidna in the Karawatha Forest - Radford.jpg
File:Zaglossus bartoni - MUSE.JPG
Attribution: Ypna
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Monotremes
Temporal range: Early Cretaceous-Recent
[pic]
Four of the five extant monotreme species: platypus (top-left), short-beaked echidna (top-right), western long-beaked echidna (bottom-left), and replica eastern long-beaked echidna (bottom-right)
Monotremes (/ˈmɒnətriːmz/, from Greek μονός, monos ('single') and τρῆμα, trema ('hole'), referring to the cloaca) are one of the three main groups of living mammals, along with placentals (Eutheria) and marsupials (Metatheria).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotreme

The platypus is one of the few monotremes still in existence today. The egg-laying mammal was only recently discovered to have lived during the Jurassic period. After analyzing a Teinolophos jawbone in 2008, University of Texas paleontologist Tim Rowe discovered that platypuses dated back as far as 122 million years ago.
Platypuses are one of only two mammalian species that lay eggs, the other being echidnas, or spiny anteaters.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/animals-as-old-as-dinosaurs_n_6982300

Teinolophos
Temporal range: Aptian ~120-113 Ma Teinolophos is a prehistoric species of monotreme, or egg-laying mammal. It is known from four specimens, each consisting of a partial lower jawbone collected from the Wonthaggi Formation at Flat Rocks, Victoria, Australia. It lived during the Aptian age of the Lower Cretaceous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teinolophos

Platypus
Evolution, paleontology, and classification
Aquatically adapted platypus-like monotremes probably evolved from a more-generalized terrestrial monotreme. The first occurrence in the fossil record of a platypus-like monotreme is from about 110 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period, when Australia was still connected to South America by Antarctica.
https://www.britannica.com/animal/platypus

Salamander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SpottedSalamander.jpg
Attribution: Camazine at English Wikipedia
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Salamander
Temporal range:
Late Jurassic - Present, 160-0 Ma
Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by a lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamander

Tortoise
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net
Public domain

Turtle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_Box_Turtle_Digon3_re-edited.jpg
Florida Box Turtle
Attribution: Jonathan Zander (Digon3)
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.


"Chicxulub crater location"
constructed using
"North America laea location map" by Uwe Dedering, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Cropped and approximate crater location circled.

"Chicxulub crater location" is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Stephen Robert Buckley.


Creative Commons licenses

CC BY-SA 3.0
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

CC BY-SA 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


Note: when I mention the extinction of the dinosaurs this is not making a clear distinction. By the extinction of the dinosaurs I mean in general the non-avian dinosaurs.

Ma - million years ago.
Ba - billion years ago.

K-T, K-Pg boundary, extinction event
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event (also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction) was a sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, approximately 66 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event

Chicxulub
pronounced [and my choice of a few]:
"Chik-shoo-loob"

Experts Reaffirm Asteroid Impact Caused Mass Extinction
MARCH 4, 2010
Some scientists have suggested that the Chicxulub (“chik-shoo-loob”) impact in Mexico ...
https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2010/03/experts-reaffirm-asteroid-impact-caused-mass-extinction/

Chicxulub impact site
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub_impact_-_artist_impression.jpg
This painting by Donald E. Davis depicts an asteroid slamming into tropical, shallow seas of the sulfur-rich Yucatan Peninsula in what is today southeast Mexico. The aftermath of this immense asteroid collision, which occurred approximately 65 million years ago, is believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species on Earth. The impact spewed hundreds of billions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere, producing a worldwide blackout and freezing temperatures which persisted for at least a decade. Shown in this painting are pterodactyls, flying reptiles with wingspans of up to 50 feet, gliding above low tropical clouds.
Author: Donald E. Davis
Public domain

Meteor Crater Location in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, near the town of Chicxulub.
"North America laea location map"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_America_laea_location_map.svg
Attribution: Uwe Dedering
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

1. The two guys from Mexico:

Because the interval of time that separates us from the formation of Chicxulub is so large, the evidence that could help to reconstruct impactor features are few. The most obvious is the diameter of the crater, which is between 180 and 200 km (Schulte et al., 2010). With these extreme values and equations (2.1.2), (2.2.2), (2.3.2), (2.4.10) we can estimate the energy of the impactor.

We considered the density of the projectile as 1650 kg m-3 for comets (Greenberg, 1998), 3400 kg m-3 for stony asteroids (Wilkison and Robinson, 2000), and 8000 kg m-3 for iron asteroids (Hills and Goda, 1993). ... Steel (1998) obtained an estimation of the range of velocities for bodies that cross Earth's orbit. For asteroids the interval is between 12.6 km s-1 and 40.7 km s-1. This result is based on measurements of the velocities of the asteroids that cross Earth's orbit.

The range for comets is between 16 km s-1 and 73 km s-1.

we concluded that the most probable impactor was a fast asteroid or a long-period comet with energy between 1.3x1024 J and 5.8x1025 J, mass between 1.0x1015 kg and 4.6x1017 kg, and diameter between 10.6 km and 80.9 km.
Assessments of the energy, mass and size of the Chicxulub Impactor
Hector Javier Durand-Manterola and Guadalupe Cordero-Tercero
Departamento de Ciencias Espaciales, Instituto de Geofísica, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México
https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6391

Suggested dates to 2014 and have a reference dated 2013.

2. Asteroid Impact Crater Calculator
http://convertalot.com/asteroid_impact_calculator.html
This JavaScript program (by Stephen R. Schmitt) calculates the effects of the impact of an object hitting the earth. It was adapted from a BASIC program from the Astronomical Computing column of Sky & Telescope, November 1996.

Devastation Caused by the Atomic Bombs: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 2014
DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-38727-2_5
In book: Hiroshima to Fukushima (pp.35-37)
Author: Eiichiro Ochiai, Juniata College
Abstract and Figures
Now, let’s go back to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The following is a summary of the features of the atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) dropped on Hiroshima. It has been estimated that it was equivalent to 16 KT of TNT (trinitrotoluene, explosive). Only about 860 g of the 70 kg of U-235 contained in the bomb was thought to have exploded. The energy released was 6.3 × 1013 J (63 TJ) (Little Boy, Wikipedia; Los Alamos Report (1985)).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299686845_Devastation_Caused_by_the_Atomic_Bombs_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Old Bicycles
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_bicycles1.jpg
Image by LoopZilla
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license.

Supercomputer: Sequoia at National Nuclear Security Administration 2012
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sequoia6.1000pix.jpg
IBM Sequoia
Attribution: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Public domain

Bird pics
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net
Public domain

Frog
Temporal range:
Early Jurassic - Present, 200-0 Ma
A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (literally without tail in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" appeared in the early Triassic of Madagascar, but molecular clock dating suggests their origins may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago.
They are also seen as environmental bellwethers, with declines in frog populations often viewed as early warning signs of environmental damage.
For the skin to serve as a respiratory organ, it must remain moist. This makes frogs susceptible to various substances they may encounter in the environment, some of which may be toxic and can dissolve in the water film and be passed into their bloodstream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Litoria_phyllochroa.JPG
Attribution: Froggydarb
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Crocodile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nile_croc_couple_690V1510_-_Flickr_-_Lip_Kee.jpg
Attribution: Lip Kee from Singapore, Republic of Singapore
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Platypus + Echidna pics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monotreme_collage.jpg
Four of the five extant monotreme species: platypus (top-left), short-beaked echidna (top-right), western long-beaked echidna (bottom-left), and replica eastern long-beaked echidna (bottom-right).
Constituent files:
File:Platypus BrokenRiver QLD Australia.jpg
File:Long-beakedEchidna.jpg
File:Echidna in the Karawatha Forest - Radford.jpg
File:Zaglossus bartoni - MUSE.JPG
Attribution: Ypna
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Monotremes
Temporal range: Early Cretaceous-Recent
[pic]
Four of the five extant monotreme species: platypus (top-left), short-beaked echidna (top-right), western long-beaked echidna (bottom-left), and replica eastern long-beaked echidna (bottom-right)
Monotremes (/ˈmɒnətriːmz/, from Greek μονός, monos ('single') and τρῆμα, trema ('hole'), referring to the cloaca) are one of the three main groups of living mammals, along with placentals (Eutheria) and marsupials (Metatheria).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotreme

The platypus is one of the few monotremes still in existence today. The egg-laying mammal was only recently discovered to have lived during the Jurassic period. After analyzing a Teinolophos jawbone in 2008, University of Texas paleontologist Tim Rowe discovered that platypuses dated back as far as 122 million years ago.
Platypuses are one of only two mammalian species that lay eggs, the other being echidnas, or spiny anteaters.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/animals-as-old-as-dinosaurs_n_6982300

Teinolophos
Temporal range: Aptian ~120-113 Ma Teinolophos is a prehistoric species of monotreme, or egg-laying mammal. It is known from four specimens, each consisting of a partial lower jawbone collected from the Wonthaggi Formation at Flat Rocks, Victoria, Australia. It lived during the Aptian age of the Lower Cretaceous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teinolophos

Platypus
Evolution, paleontology, and classification
Aquatically adapted platypus-like monotremes probably evolved from a more-generalized terrestrial monotreme. The first occurrence in the fossil record of a platypus-like monotreme is from about 110 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period, when Australia was still connected to South America by Antarctica.
https://www.britannica.com/animal/platypus

Salamander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SpottedSalamander.jpg
Attribution: Camazine at English Wikipedia
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Salamander
Temporal range:
Late Jurassic - Present, 160-0 Ma
Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by a lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamander

Tortoise
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net
Public domain

Turtle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_Box_Turtle_Digon3_re-edited.jpg
Florida Box Turtle
Attribution: Jonathan Zander (Digon3)
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.


"Chicxulub crater location"
constructed using
"North America laea location map" by Uwe Dedering, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Cropped and approximate crater location circled.

"Chicxulub crater location" is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Stephen Robert Buckley.


Creative Commons licenses

CC BY-SA 3.0
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

CC BY-SA 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


Top of page
Stephen Buckley
E-mail: greatesthoax [at] duck.com
Last revised: 15 Apr 2023.
Construction started about 30 Jun 2022.


Page design/construction Stephen Buckley 2022.