Dino Destroyer Asteroids More Common Than Thought?

Most of us are under the impression that the rock that wiped out the dinos and proceeded to wreck the world's ecology was a rare event. But according to a couple of recently suggest that impact events of this magnitude or greater - have actually been commonplace in Earth's early history.

Even more controversial is the suggestion that the Cretaceous extinction event was only part of a larger group of impactors that had been impacting Earth for billions of year of it early history.

Researchers base their new timeline on layers of material that fell back to Earth after being thrown into space. This material seems to suggest a bombardment period of between 3.5 and 1.7 billion years while the standard models of an heavy impact period of from 4.1 to 3.8 billion years.

The IO9 article goes on to suggest that these asteroids may have come from a section of the no long extinct part of the asteroid belt that existed between Mars and Jupiter

Here is the link to the IO9 article.

Did the Chicxulub impactor have a BIG brother?

It is a fairly universal fact that the impactor 65 million years ago that happened off the coast of Mexico at Chicxulub played the death knell for many plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs. However there are still that remaining nagging few who say that the Chicxulub object could not have done such a devastating job all on its' own. They point to the Deccan Traps area that underwent bouts of volcanic activity between 68 and 64 million years ago. The thought is that this activity would have blocked so much of the sun's energy that most plants would have died and along with it the animals that depended on the as well.

There is however a problem. Such a large area of volcanic activity usually is attached to a tectonic plate's rim. Not so in this case. It was one of the odd hot-spot breakouts like Yellowstone or the Hawaiian island chain. But again there is a problem. These hot-spots are relatively speaking fairly small. The Deccan Traps covers a staggering 500,000 square kilometers! Weirder still, lava that makes up the Deccan Traps is high in iridium, not common in the Earth's crust but very common in yep, you guessed it.... meteorites. And such a meteorite! If the measurements are even close, we may find that the Earth was struck, at about the same time as Chicxulub, by an unbelievably huge 30km impactor!

I am only taking a small part of the really fascinating article in IO9. It reads like the best mystery novel. Check it out HERE