Planet Earth Assassination Theory

Discussion

The scientific debate on the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, mass extinction event has focused on a meteorite impact since 1980. Physicists Luis and Walter Alvarez, with chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, produced the first evidence of an impact10. Across the globe from Italy to New Zealand the team found a layer of iridium in the geological sedimentary layers of the K-T boundary. This has become known as the "iridium anomaly". Iridium is extremely rare in the Earth's crust but abundant in meteors, asteroids and comets. The conclusion was the concentration of iridium at the K-T boundary, up to 160 times normal levels in one sample, had to have been from an extra-terrestrial source.

Iridium is also derived from a terrestrial origin or more precisely a sub-terrestrial source. Christian Ganter, in his 1986 paper11, showed iridium is only present in the mantle at significant depths and I. Olmez, D. Finnegan and W. Zoller (1986)12 demonstrated modern volcanic eruptions fed by magma plumes from deep inside the planet, like at Kilauea in Hawaii, contain high levels of iridium. The Deccan Traps rate of eruption was at least 30 times the rate of the Hawaiian eruptions today and estimates of the fire fountains generated by eruptions on the scale of the Deccan Traps suggests that aerosols and ash would easily have been carried into the stratosphere. The iridium anomaly at the K-T boundary could have been created by a single or multiple asteroid impacts or the massive eruptions at the Deccan Traps that lasted for approximately a million years.

While the asteroid impact theory was radical and contentious at the time, an impact event has come to be one of the most prominent hypotheses for the mass extinction of plant and animal life 65 million years ago. In 1990 Alan Hildebrand and Glen Penfield identified the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, as the possible K-T boundary impact crater13. Discovery of the 180km/110mi diameter crater led to universal acceptance of the impact hypothesis. This has been further strengthened in 2013 by Paul Renne's high-precision dating technique on tektities14 - pebble shaped rocks formed during meteorite impacts.

Sankar Chatterjee at Texas Tech University calculated in 2004 the Deccan Traps abruptly began erupting a million years before the Chicxulub impact15. The fact the research points to the Deccan Traps erupting before the Chicxulub impact has led many to conclude one could not be as a result of the other. A million years discrepancy when taken in reference to geological time, when life first began on Earth 4 billion years ago, and present day gives a coincidence correlation of 0.025%. There is a 1 in 4000 chance of those two events occurring at relatively the same moment in relation to the time life has been on this planet. While probability can create anomalies, Paul Renne's Berkeley Geochronology Center provide more conclusive proof14, dating the impact event tektities to 66.043 million years ago. This is almost a million years earlier than previously thought and brings the impact to exactly to the date the Deccan Traps abruptly began erupting.

After variations in time, the predominant reason for the Deccan Traps not being connected to the comet impact is the site of the traps is not on the direct opposite side of the world from Chicxulub, Mexico. The Deccan Traps are approximately 5,000km from the antipode of the Chicxulub crater. The Introduction to this paper sited movement of tectonic places over 66 million years as one of the reasons the site could have moved but extensive modeling of this scenario is inconclusive. This is an unsolved problem for antipodal pressure wave research. This theory relies on wherever the comet hit creating vibrations that travel through the Earth's crust and meeting on the other side of the world creating a lava plume. However, the lava plume must be on the exact opposite side of the world for this to be true.

The Introduction to this paper touched on another crucial element that has been overlooked: ballistics. When a projectile hits and enters a target the 'angle of attack' is crucial in determining the exit point. In the case of a comet hitting and entering a planet angle of attack would have a significant impact on an antipodal 'exit wound' lava plume. An angle of attack penetrating the Earth's crust at exactly vertical, or 90 degrees to the horizon, would create a lava plume on exactly the opposite side of the world. However, this cannot be conclusively proved. The Chicxulub angle of attack, according to L. A. W. Watts, R. Greeley and H. J. Melosh (1991)16, was between 20 and 30 degrees off vertical. In context of the Earth, 20 degrees off vertical would create an exit wound up to 4,800km from an exact antipodal point and 30 degrees would create an exit wound on the other side of the world of up to 7,200km away from an exact antipodal point. Only if the Chicxulub impact entered the Earth's crust could it have created the Deccan Traps.