ROCK LAYERS CHALLENGE ASTEROID THEORY, according to report in ScienceDaily 28
April 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 Keller
of 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 said: "We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of
the Chicxulub impact," says Keller. 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."
ScienceDaily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427010803.htm
ED. COM. 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 math on the rock layer central to this debate, which 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 favorite neo-catastrophist's constant comment
(Dr. Derek Ager), "If one attempts to calculate rates of sedimentation in the past, the results are
usually ludicrous." The New Catastrophism, p1,Cambridge University Press, 1993 International
Sand Collectors: http://www.sandcollectors.org/What_is_Sandx.html (Ref. sedimentology, time,
uniformitarianism) |