Scientists have noticed at nuclear test sites in sandy areas that one effect of the atomic blast is to fuse the sand into a green glass. Yet glass of this type is found throughout the globe in certain geological strata. Steiger asks:
Could it be possible that these sites provide evidence of a prehistoric nuclear war?
Droplets of molten glass are found in the KT boundary layer. One might wonder whether any of the late Cretaceous sediments contain unusual amounts of long-lived nuclear isotopes or their decay products.
Advocates of the asteroid theory point to stress lines in pieces of quartz, stress lines that have only been noted in quartz in four different circumstances, one being in the residues at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The other three instances are in the laboratory produced by tests, in known meteorite craters, and on the Nevada nuclear test site. The expert’s argument goes:
We have found stressed quartz; we know it occurs where meteorites have fallen; therefore a meteorite fell. (Oh, the same effects can be made artificially in the laboratory or by nuclear bomb blasts, but we all know those are irrelevant in this context.)
Though pollution can damage forests much worse damage would occur from nuclear attack and fallout. Pine trees protect themselves against damage by exuding a resin which subsequently hardens and becomes amber. An explanation of the large amounts of amber found in some parts of the world could be that radiation or pollution severely damaged or stressed pine forests leaving the trees exuding their natural defensive substance in large quantities.
After the disaster at Chernobyl, scientists studying the effects of fallout on coniferous forests found that the trees quickly absorbed dangerous radioactive cesium and incorporated it into their wood. But not by the root system—cesium sinks only slowly into the soil and it would take 25 years or more for it to begin to be taken up this way—pine needles directly absorbed the radioactive elements. Thus radioactive cesium is absorbed rapidly through pine needles and more slowly through roots subjecting the trees to severe stress for a long period but without necessarily killing them. When the trees eventually did die long lived isotopes would return to the soil to continue their damage in succeeding generations. Amber is variously dated. Baltic amber is usually dated in the Oligocene epoch of about 30 million years ago but the Eocene epoch of 55 million years ago is also given. Valchovite, the amber from Czechoslovakia, is dated to the late Cretaceous period, the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Radioactive emissions preserve. A dinosaur “mummy” hadrosaur discovered by Charles Sternberg died 65 million years ago, lying on its back apparently unharmed and with no signs of predators or scavengers having touched it. It is odd that it did not decay or get eaten. Supposedly it dried out in the sun, got swiftly washed downstream and got covered with fine mud so quickly that its dried skin had no time to rehydrate and decay. Dinosaur mummies are rare, but when found they are usually late Cretaceous hadrosaurs. Why should they have died so perfectly and been preserved? Because they died of gamma radiation and neutrons which preserved them as surely as it would preserve strawberries in a plastic bag?
Failure of photosynthesis is another mechanism of dinosaur extinctions. Dust from the crashing asteroid or erupting volcanoes cut off the light and heat of the sun, preventing plants from making sugars and cellulose from carbon dioxide and water. Plants would die then animals would starve, and if the darkness continued for long enough whole species would become extinct. It could happen today. Some scientists wrote in 1984:
…clouds of fine particles would soon spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere, absorbing and scattering sunlight and thus darkening and cooling the earth’s surface. Continental temperatures could fall rapidly—well below freezing for months, even in summertime… We have only recently become aware of how severe the cold and the dark might be… agriculture, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, could be severely damaged for a year or more, causing widespread famine… humans would die from freezing, starvation, disease, and the effects of radiation… the extinction of many plant and animal species can be expected, and in extreme cases, the extinction of most non-oceanic species might occur…
They were warning the Pope of the dangers, not of volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts, but of a nuclear winter following a nuclear war.
They concluded:
Nuclear war could thus carry in its wake a destruction of life unparalleled at any time during the tenure of humans on earth, and might therefore imperil the future of humanity.
Quite. And did the anthroposaurs actually do this 65 million years ago to cause the Cretaceous mass extinction of species? If a nuclear war could cause extinctions now, why shouldn’t a nuclear war among anthroposaurs have done the same then?
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