Planet Earth Assassination Theory

Introduction

The mass extinction event at the margin of the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods, or K-T boundary, is widely studied and researched. The prominent cause involves an asteroid impact. However, there are many conflicting hypothesis for such wide-spread plant and animal extinctions that include increased volcanism, mass lava ejections, sea level regression and climate change.

The Chicxulub impact, on the present-day Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, is considered the most likely location of the asteroid impact. This impact has also been extensively and accurately modeled by Los Alamos National Laboratory1 and the University of Arizona2. While these models prove the devastating power of the impact they assume the meteor was flattened or destroyed in the initial collision.

However, studies by Adrian Jones and David Price at University College London3 suggest meteorites 10km or larger could punch through the Earth's crust and enter the mantle. Using the minimum factors for the Chicxulub asteroid on the Imperial College London "Earth Impact Effects Program"4 a 10km diameter object traveling at median asteroid speed of 17km/s would make a crater 30km deep. The Earth's outer surface at Chicxulub is continental crust at 10km - 20km thickness.

The Chicxulub asteroid could have been even larger. Hector Durand-Manterola and Guadalupe Cordero-Tercero at Cornell University5 have confirmed the physical parameters of the impactor are not limited. Based on concentrations of iridium and the mass of the object, they found the asteroid was a minimum 10.6km in diameter up to a maximum 80.9km in diameter. Their calculations also concluded that the impactor wasn't an asteroid at all but a comet.

Asteroids travel at approximately 10 - 30km/s. Comets travel at approximately 50 - 70km/s. It is the hypothesis of this paper the Chicxulub impact punched through the Earth's crust and entered the mantle.

The Earth's crust "floats" on top of the mantle; however, the mantle is a very viscous liquid that is predominantly solid. Only very high pressures and temperatures can melt the mantle to create magma plumes. These are seen around the world's surface as lava running like a river. Geology and physics show the Chicxulub impact created extreme levels of heat and pressure when it crashed through the crust and entered the mantle. This paper contends ballistics play a crucial role. The Chicxulub comet would have acted as a "kinetic energy penetrator" (K.E.P.) on the Earth. In the military this is an ammunition that does not contain explosives but uses its speed and mass to penetrate, and destroy, a target. Durand-Manterola and Cordero-Tercero5 have calculated the kinetic energy of the Chicxulub impact was up to 5.8x1025 Joules, the single, most powerful event to ever occur on the Earth.

When a "kinetic energy penetrator" hits a solid object the enormous energy transfer forces the solid to behave like a liquid. This means the K.E.P. can penetrate further. As the K.E.P. enters it creates cavitation through a high pressure heat wave. Ballistics could model how far the Chicxulub comet could penetrate the mantle.

The Chicxulub comet would only travel so far into the mantle and then come to a stop. This action is the most destructive in ballistics as it leads to a "high energy transfer". When a high speed projectile penetrates an object and comes to a stop it transfers all of its kinetic energy into the object in the form of a shock wave. That shock wave travels onwards, along the entry path, with devastating effects.

Therefore in ballistics, exit wounds, where a projectile comes to a stop and a shock wave has travelled through an object to explode out of the opposite side, are much larger and have a longer lasting effects than entry wounds. The Deccan Traps, where plumes of magma exploded from inside the Earth at approximately the same time as the Chicxulub impact, cover an area up to 1.5 million km² while the Yucatan crater is 25,450 km².

The theory a comet impact on one side of a planet could result in damage on the opposite side, the "exit wound" being antipodal to the "entry wound", has been proposed based on research on other planets in our solar system. P. Schultz and D. Gault6 proposed disruption to the moon as early as 1975. D. Weber, T. Bennett and C. Weber7 demonstrated the correlation between magma bulges and volanoes on Mars and Mercury with large impact craters on the other side of the planet.

It would be disingenuous not to mention that antipodal theory has been proposed for our planet. Mark Richards, at UC Berkeley, has published research on the "uncomfortably close coincidence"8 between the Deccan Traps and Chicxulub crater. However, the Berkeley team's hypothesis focuses on the impact energy splitting, traveling around the planet's crust and then coming together antipodal to the collision and forcing lava up from below.

The Berkeley team's research highlighted an issue with antipodal theory - the Deccan Traps are 5,000km from the exact, opposite spot of the Chicxulub crater. Two issues can challenge this. The first is this fact relates to their positions today. It does not take into account 66 million years of continental drift. The second relates to ballistics. The angle at which the comet hit, and penetrated, the Earth's surface, would determine where the antipodal position would be created, not just the location.

This introduction demonstrates a strong correlation between the Chicxulub impact crater and the Deccan Traps. Combined with studies in ballistics, the hypothesis would be a comet traveling at very high speed impacted the Earth like a bullet, the kinetic energy penetrator smashed through the crust, it continued moving into the mantle, when it stopped the kinetic energy was transferred into a shock wave that continued on through the Earth and exploded out of the other side of the planet.

As antipodal theory has been seen multiple times in other planets in our solar system, a further hypothesis would be this same event has occurred at other moments in the history of the Earth. Research at Ohio State University9, links the Wilkes Crater in Antarctica with the Siberian Traps in the Arctic. These events occurred at the time of the "Great Dying" at the Permian-Triassic, or P-Tr, boundary mass extinction event 252 million years ago. This paper postulates a link between start of the Central Atlantic magmatic province and the Bedout impact in Australia. Both events occurred around 200 million years ago, are antipodal and are linked to the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event 201.3 million years ago.

In the sections below, we look in greater detail at the proposals. The crucial role ballistics may have on geological impact theories is investigated more thoroughly. The physics of impacts is also explored in greater detail including the use of Sir Isaac Newton's "approximation for the penetration depth of a projectile at high velocity". The hypothesis of this paper remains consistent - the kinetic energy of the comet impact at Chicxulub was an entry wound where a projectile shot through the Earth's crust, into the mantle and the shock wave exploded out of an exit wound that we know as the Deccan Traps. It was an assassination in all but name.