Luis Alverez himself, in 1982, drew the parallels between the asteroid collision and a nuclear war. A major exchange of bombs on the scale we have them at present could release the same energy as the fall of a 1000 yard wide asteroid. The asteroid would concentrate all the impact in one spot and be capable of blowing chunks of terrestrial matter high into the atmosphere, even out into space. A nuclear exchange would not put as much matter into the high stratosphere, but what did go up would be more evenly distributed geographically, and might also be spread out over a period of time.
Chicago University scientists found deposits of carbon distributed world wide in the iridium layers. Apparently there had been extensive and intense fires. The fires would have darkened the skies with dense smoke and poisoned the air with incompletely burnt carbon forming the deadly poisonous gas carbon monoxide. Couldn’t atomic warfare have ignited these fires? Was there a nuclear winter?
A sudden cooling certainly did occur. The coal layer at the end of the Cretaceous Period marks a distinct change in climate. In the more recent rocks above it are cool climate plants like the giant sequioa; in the older rocks below it are subtropical plants like ferns and cycads. Is this layer of coal a fossil of the nuclear winter?
In 1962-63 southern England experienced its coldest winter since 1740. The cause was a peculiar meandering of the stratospheric jetstream, a fierce continuous blast of wind which influences weather patterns even though it is itself above the weather zone. Over Britain the jetstream pushed arctic air further south.
1962 marked the culmination, prior to the implementation of the nuclear atmospheric test ban treaty, of an enormous escalation of atmospheric testing. About 20 megatons were tested in 1958, but in both 1961 and 1962 the tonnage tested was about 200 megatons. K Y Kondratyev, the former USSR’s leading atmospheric scientist says that the tests severely disturbed thermal radiation in the upper atmosphere leading to four per cent less sunlight reaching the surface.
The Russians were particularly concerned because one result was that their grain harvest in 1963 was disastrous. The attenuation of the sunlight was the result of the production of brown nitrogen oxides in the nuclear fireballs. And that was only with 200 megatons exploded over deserts or oceans such that dust and smoke were not created. A nuclear winter is not in the realms of fantasy. Smoke and dust do not have to be sent into the stratosphere to prevent the sun’s rays from reaching the surface—nitrogen oxides do the job quite well, though any serious nuclear conflagration will provide smoke and dust aplenty as well as brown fumes.
Radiation
Another reason offered for the downfall of our dinosaurian predecessors is radiation from space. We do not need supernovas or any such explanations for the danger that we face today from radiation from space. Few people will be unaware of the hole in the ozone layer observed over the Antarctic. More recently one has been noted in the Arctic and it is getting bigger. The March 1985 edition of the UN Environment Program News stated that “ozone depletion could seriously affect many life forms”. Ozone blocks the entry of high energy UV radiation to the earth’s surface. UV causes blindness and skin cancer in humans.
The agents destroying the ozone layer are CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons. We release CFCs into the air faster than nature degrades them. They react with UV radiation in the stratosphere to give free radicals which then trigger a chain reaction breaking ozone into ordinary oxygen which has no protective value against UV. Each 2.5 per cent rise in CFC concentration causes an extra million skin cancers. The World Wide Fund for nature claims that the extra UV reaching the earth’s surface is killing phytoplankton, the primary food source of the oceans.
The CFCs are also particularly powerful greenhouse gases, 1000 times more effective than carbon dioxide. Dr Robert Watson maintains that the ozone layer will continue to reduce for the next fifty years whatever we do because of the chlorine already released. International Conferences calling for cuts in production of CFCs can apparently achieve nothing in our lifetime. We can only take measures that might benefit our children! Burning tropical forests contributes also.
The amount of smoke produced from the fires in the Amazon region, according to Dr Alberto Setzer of Brazil’s space research institute, is equivalent to a hundred volcanoes erupting. Professor Paul Crutzens, Head of the Max Planck Institute at Mainz and one of the world’s leading experts on the ozone layer, says these fires are among the main causes of ozone destruction. The peak of Amazon burning is in August. It takes about ten days for the smoke to penetrate the stratosphere and travel south. The peak of Antarctic ozone erosion occurs from September to November. Maybe the soot layer in the KT boundary zone reported from New Zealand and elsewhere indicates that the anthroposaurs destroyed their ozone layer and left themselves exposed to deadly UV radiation. Again one feels justified in asking whether today’s events have been experienced before by the earth.
I have tried to convince you that an intelligent dinosaur could have destroyed much of the life on earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Many facts support the hypothesis. Moreover we can see the intelligent species with which we are familiar—ourselves—creating conditions that seem to mirror those that were so destructive then.
Needless to say, experts often find it hard to see.
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