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Re: Chicxulub's Antipode (Re: cause of death at KT)
At 2:25 AM +0000 9/3/06, Phillip Bigelow wrote:
>On Sat, 02 Sep 2006 22:12:53 -0700 (PDT) don ohmes <d_ohmes@yahoo.com>
>writes:
>> At risk of getting on thin crust--
>>
>> 1). 65 my is old for deep ocean crust. Might be hard to find some
>> that was in the antipodal location at the time. Stuff can move fast,
>> like 10cm/a. That is 6500km since KT, IMMC. Might, in fact, be all
>> subducted.
>
>
>Regarding the sea floor around India, you might be right. [I am a
>neophyte when it comes to southern Asian tectonics]. But there are
>numerous places in today's Pacific Ocean that still contain 65 my old
>oceanic crust.
According to
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~data/database/oceanage/jgr_paper.html there is
some Cretaceous sea-floor crust off the east coast of India and the west coast
of Australia. The actual antipodes from the KT impact may have been subducted
by now, but I would expect whatever splashed down to have been spread over a
significant area. So there's hope for finding something, but it may take some
work.
--
Jeff Hecht, science & technology writer
jeff@jeffhecht.com http://www.jhecht.net
Boston Correspondent: New Scientist magazine
525 Auburn St., Auburndale, MA 02466 USA
v. 617-965-3834; fax 617-332-4760