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Re: The P-Tr meteorite



At 11:06 PM +0200 9/24/01, David Marjanovic wrote:
Now look at that http://www.nature.com/nsu/010920/010920-6.html.

"Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University, Japan, and his colleagues have found
evidence in southern China that a massive impact converted huge amounts of
solid sulphur into sulphur-rich gases.
        The released sulphur could have consumed 20-40 per cent of the
atmosphere's oxygen, and generated enough acid rain to raise the acidity of
the ocean's surface waters temporarily to that of lemon juice. Ocean life
would have been pickled."

Even worse than the K-T Strangelove ocean. Incredible.

Very incredible. I wrote a short for New Scientist about it, but I never could get a good explanation of how the proposed mechanism worked or how they deduced such a tremendous release of sulfur from the anomalous concentration of sulfur isotopes they saw. Thus I'm skeptical they have "the" answer. -- Jeff Hecht
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