New Study Sparks Very Heated Debate at Geophysical Union Conference
in Nice, France
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030407/030407-7.html
Snippet:
The announcement is based on preliminary analysis of the first core
drilled into the 185-kilometre Chicxulub asteroid crater near the
Yucatan Peninsula. Gerta Keller of Princeton University in New
Jersey says that she has found microfossils there hinting that
abundant plankton survived for at least 300,000 years after the
impact.
Many believe that the impact shrouded the Earth in dust and debris,
shutting down plant photosynthesis and leading to the rapid demise
of most creatures, from marine microorganisms to dinosaurs.
But Keller reckons that the signs of life in the crater core
are "the smoking gun" that the asteroid didn't cause the widespread
die-out, properly called the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary.
What's more, a lack of evidence of compaction in the core hints that
the impact crater was much smaller than was thought, says Keller's
colleague Wolfgang Stinnesbeck at the University of Karlsruhe,
Germany.
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