New rocky evidence has been emerging about the dinos’ final days
Jan 31, 2017 — 7:10 am EST
This
is an artist’s representation of what may have killed the dinosaurs –
although he took some license in representing species that were not all
alive at the same time.
Claus Lunau/Science Source
Below
the turquoise waters of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula lies the site of a
long ago mass murder. In a geologic instant, most of the world’s animal
and plant species went extinct. Drilling through hundreds of meters of
rock, investigators have finally reached the "footprint" left by the
accused. That footprint marks Earth’s most notorious space rock impact.
Known as Chicxulub (CHEEK-shuh-loob), it’s the dinosaur killer.
Scientists
are assembling the most detailed timeline yet of the dino apocalypse.
They are giving fresh scrutiny to telltale fingerprints left by the
fateful event so long ago. At the impact site, an asteroid (or maybe a
comet) crashed onto Earth’s surface. Mountains formed in mere minutes.
In North America, a towering tsunami buried plants and animals alike
under thick piles of rubble. Lofted debris darkened skies around the
world. The planet chilled — and stayed that way for years.
But the asteroid may not have acted alone.
Life may already have been in trouble. Growing evidence points to a supervolcanic accomplice. Eruptions in what is now India spewed out molten rock and caustic gases. These may have acidified the oceans. All of this could have destabilized ecosystems long before and after the asteroid hit. The jolt of that impact may even have boosted the eruptions, some researchers now argue.
As more clues have emerged, some seem to conflict. That has made the identity of the dinosaurs’ true killer — an impact, volcanism or both — less clear, says Paul Renne. He is a geoscientist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California.
“As we’ve improved our understanding of the timing, we haven’t resolved the details,” he says. “The last decade of work has only made it harder to distinguish between the two potential causes.”
Everything living on Earth today traces its ancestry to the few lucky survivors.
Over
the years, scientists have blamed many suspects for this catastrophic
die-out. Some have suggested global plagues struck. Or maybe a supernova
fried the planet. In 1980, a team of researchers including father-son
duo Luis and Walter Alvarez reported discovering lots of iridium in
places worldwide. That element appeared along the K-Pg boundary.
Iridium is rare in Earth’s crust, but abundant in asteroids and other space rocks. The finding marked the first hard evidence for a killer-asteroid impact. But without a crater, the hypothesis couldn’t be confirmed.
Piles of impact debris led crater hunters to the Caribbean. Eleven years after the Alvarez paper, scientists at last identified the smoking gun — the hidden crater.
It circled the coastal Mexican town of Chicxulub Puerto. (The crater actually had been discovered in the late 1970s by oil company scientists. They had used variations in Earth’s gravity to visualize the crater’s 180-kilometer- [110-mile-] wide outline. Word of that find, however, did not reach crater hunters for years.) Based in part on the gaping size of the depression, scientists estimated the size of the impact. They figured it must have released 10 billion times as much energy as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
That’s big.
Questions have remained, though, about how the impact might have caused so much death and destruction worldwide.
It now appears that the blast itself wasn’t the big killer in the impact scenario. It was the darkness that followed.
How long did the darkness last? Some scientists had estimated that it was anywhere from a few months to years. But a new computer model is giving researchers a better sense of what happened.
It simulated the length and severity of the global cooldown. And it must have been truly dramatic, reports Clay Tabor. He works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. As a paleoclimatologist, he studies ancient climates. And he and his colleagues have reconstructed a sort of digital crime scene. It was one of the most detailed computer simulations ever made of the impact’s effect on climate.
The simulation begins by estimating the climate before the smash-up. The researchers determined what that climate might be from geologic evidence of ancient plants and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Then comes the soot. A high-end estimate of soot totals some 70 billion metric tons (about 77 billion U.S. short tons). That number is based on the size and global fallout of the impact. And it’s huge. It’s the equivalent weight of about 211,000 Empire State Buildings!
For two years, no light reached Earth’s surface, the simulation shows. Not any part of Earth’s surface! Global temperatures plummeted 16 degrees Celsius (30 degrees Fahrenheit). Arctic ice spread southward. Tabor shared this dramatic scenario in September 2016 in Denver, Colo. at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
Some areas would have been hit particularly hard, Tabor’s work suggests. The temperature nosedived in the Pacific Ocean, around the equator. Meanwhile, coastal Antarctica barely cooled. Inland areas generally fared worse than coastal ones. Those divides could help explain why some species and ecosystems weathered the impact while others died off, Tabor says.
Six years after the impact, sunshine returned to levels typical of conditions before the impact. Two years after that, land temperatures warmed to levels higher than had been typical before the impact. Then, all of the carbon flung into the air by the impact took effect. It acted like an insulating blanket over the planet. And the globe ultimately warmed several degrees more.
Evidence of the chilling darkness is in the rock record. Local sea surface temperatures modified lipid (fat) molecules in the membranes of ancient microbes. The fossilized remains of those lipids provide a temperature record, reports Johan Vellekoop. He is a geologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Fossilized lipids in what is now New Jersey suggest that temperatures there plummeted 3 degrees C (about 5 degrees F) following the impact. Vellekoop and colleagues shared their estimates in the June 2016 Geology.
Similar abrupt temperature drops plus darkened skies killed plants and other species that nourish the rest of the food web, Vellekoop says. “Dim the lights and the entire ecosystem collapses.”
The cold darkness was the impact’s deadliest weapon. Some unfortunate critters, though, died too soon to witness it.
Story continues below image.
Robert DePalma is a paleontologist with the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida. He’s worked in the dry Hell Creek badlands, thousands of kilometers (miles) away from the Chicxulub crater. And there he has found something surprising — signs of a tsunami.
Evidence of the supersized tsunami generated by the Chicxulub impact had previously been found only around the Gulf of Mexico. It had never been seen this far north or so far inland. But the symptoms of tsunami devastation were clear, DePalma says. The rushing water dumped sediment onto the landscape. The debris originated from the nearby Western Interior Seaway. This body of water once cut across North America from Texas to the Arctic Ocean.
The sediment contained iridium and glassy debris that formed from rock vaporized by the impact. It also contained fossils of sea species such as snaillike ammonites. They had been carried from the seaway.
And the evidence didn’t stop there.
At the geological society meeting last year, DePalma pulled up slides of fish fossils found inside the tsunami deposits. “These are the dead bodies,” he said. “If a [crime scene investigation] team walks over to a burnt-out building, how do they know if the guy died before or during the fire? You look for carbon and soot in the lungs. In this case, fish have gills, so we checked those out.”
The gills were packed with glass from the impact. That means the fish were alive and swimming when the asteroid hit. The fish had been alive up until the moment the tsunami pushed across the landscape. It crushed the fish under debris. Those unfortunate fish, DePalma says, are the first known direct victims of the Chicxulub impact.
The climate change and deforestation that followed took longer to do their damage.
Just under the fish-filled tsunami deposits was another amazing find: dinosaur tracks from two species. Jan Smit is an Earth scientist at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “These dinosaurs were running and alive before they were hit by the tsunami,” he says. “The entire ecosystem in Hell Creek was alive and kicking until the last moment. In no way was it on the decline.”
The new evidence from the Hell Creek Formation confirms that most of the deaths at the time were caused by the Chicxulub impact, Smit now argues. “I was 99 percent sure that it was the impact. And now that we’ve found this evidence, I’m 99.5 percent sure.”
While many other scientists share Smit’s certainty, a growing faction does not. Emerging evidence supports an alternative hypothesis for the dinosaurs’ demise. Their downfall may have come at least partly from deep within the Earth.
Researchers
determined the ages of crystals embedded in the Deccan lava flows.
These show that most of the eruptions began roughly 250,000 years before
the Chicxulub impact. And they continued until about 500,000 years
after it. This means that the eruptions were raging at the height of the
extinctions.
This new timeline lends credence to those who doubt that the Chicxulub impact was the chief cause of the extinction event.
“Deccan volcanism is vastly more dangerous to life on Earth than an impact,” says Gerta Keller. She is a paleontologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. Recent research is showing just how detrimental. In the same way that iridium marks fallout from the Chicxulub impact, the Deccan volcanism has a calling card of its own. It is the element mercury.
Most mercury in the environment originated from volcanoes. Large eruptions cough up tons of the element. Deccan was no exception. The bulk of the Deccan eruptions released a total of between 99 million and 178 million metric tons (about 109 million and 196 million U.S. short tons) of mercury. Chicxulub released just a fraction of that.
All that mercury left a mark. It shows up in southwestern France and elsewhere. A research team discovered lots of mercury, for instance, in sediment laid down before the impact. Those same sediments held another clue as well — the fossilized shells of plankton (small floating sea organisms) from the dinosaur days. Unlike healthy shells, these specimens are thin and cracked. The researchers reported this in the February 2016 Geology.
The shell pieces suggest that carbon dioxide released by the Deccan eruptions made the oceans too acidic for some creatures, says Thierry Adatte. He is a geoscientist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He coauthored the study with Keller.
“Survival was getting very difficult for these critters,” Keller says. Plankton form the foundation of the ocean ecosystem. Their decline rattled the entire food web, she suspects. (A similar trend is happening today as seawater soaks up carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.) And as waters turned more acidic, it took the animals more energy to make their shells.
After
the start of the Deccan eruptions and the resulting rise in atmospheric
carbon dioxide, local temperatures warmed about 7.8 degrees C (14
degrees F). The team reported these results in the July 2016 Nature Communications.
About 150,000 years later, a second, smaller warming phase coincided with the Chicxulub impact. Both of these warming periods corresponded with high extinction rates on the island.
“Everyone wasn’t just living happily, and then boom, this impact came out of nowhere,” says Sierra Petersen. She is a geochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She also worked on this study. Plants and animals “were already under stress and not having a great day. And this impact happens and pushes them over the top,” she says.
Both catastrophic events were major contributors to the extinctions. “Either one would have caused some extinction,” she says. “But such a mass extinction is due to a combination of both events,” she now concludes.
Not everyone agrees.
Noting that some parts of the world were affected by the Deccan eruptions before the impact is not enough to show that life overall was stressed back then, says Joanna Morgan. She is a geophysicist at Imperial College London in England. Fossil evidence in many areas, she says, suggests that sea life flourished until the impact.
But maybe bad luck wasn’t the reason the dinosaurs encountered two devastating disasters at once. Maybe the impact and the volcanism were related, some researchers propose. The idea isn’t an attempt to get impact purists and the volcano devotees to play nice. Volcanoes often erupt after major earthquakes. This happened in 1960. The Cordón-Caulle eruption in Chile started two days after a nearby magnitude-9.5 quake. The seismic shock waves from the Chicxulub impact potentially reached even higher — a magnitude 10 or more, Renne says.
He and his colleagues have traced the intensity of the volcanism during the time of the impact. Eruptions before and after it went on uninterrupted for 91,000 years. Renne reported that last April at a meeting in Vienna, Austria of the European Geosciences Union. The nature of the eruptions, however, changed within 50,000 years before or after the impact. The amount of erupted material jumped from 0.2 to 0.6 cubic kilometer (0.05 to 0.14 cubic mile) annually. Something must have altered the volcanic plumbing, he says.
In 2015, Renne and his team formally outlined their one-two punch extinction hypothesis in Science. The shock of the impact fractured the rock enclosing the Deccan magma, they proposed. That allowed the molten rock to expand and possibly enlarge or combine magma chambers. Dissolved gases in the magma formed bubbles. Those bubbles propelled material upward like in a shaken soda can.
The physics behind this impact-volcano combo is not firm, say scientists on both sides of the debate. That’s true especially because Deccan and the impact site were so distant from each other. “This is all guesswork and perhaps wishful thinking,” Princeton’s Keller says.
Sean Gulick also isn’t convinced. He says the evidence isn’t there. He is a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re hunting for another explanation when there’s already an obvious one,” he says. “The impact did it alone.”
Over the coming months and years, improved computer simulations of the dinosaur doomsday — and ongoing studies of Chicxulub and Deccan rocks — could further shake up the debate. For now, a definitive guilty verdict on either accused killer would be difficult, Renne predicts.
Both events devastated the planet in similar ways at around the same time. “It’s no longer easy to distinguish between the two,” he says. For now, at least, the case of the dinosaur killer will remain an unsolved mystery.
Known as Chicxulub (CHEEK-shuh-loob), it’s the dinosaur killer.
The asteroid impact that caused a massive global extinction event can be found on the coast of Mexico.
Google Maps/UT Jackson School of Geosciences
But the asteroid may not have acted alone.
Life may already have been in trouble. Growing evidence points to a supervolcanic accomplice. Eruptions in what is now India spewed out molten rock and caustic gases. These may have acidified the oceans. All of this could have destabilized ecosystems long before and after the asteroid hit. The jolt of that impact may even have boosted the eruptions, some researchers now argue.
As more clues have emerged, some seem to conflict. That has made the identity of the dinosaurs’ true killer — an impact, volcanism or both — less clear, says Paul Renne. He is a geoscientist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California.
“As we’ve improved our understanding of the timing, we haven’t resolved the details,” he says. “The last decade of work has only made it harder to distinguish between the two potential causes.”
The smoking gun
What is clear is that a massive die-off took place around 66 million years ago. It is visible in the layers of rock that mark the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. Fossils that were once abundant no longer appear in rocks after that time. Studies of fossils found (or not found) across the boundary between these two periods — abbreviated the K-Pg boundary — show that some three out of every four plant and animal species went extinct at about the same time. This included everything from the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex to microscopic plankton.Everything living on Earth today traces its ancestry to the few lucky survivors.
A
lighter-colored rock layer rich in iridium marks the boundary between
the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. This layer can be found in rocks
around the world.
Eurico Zimbres/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Iridium is rare in Earth’s crust, but abundant in asteroids and other space rocks. The finding marked the first hard evidence for a killer-asteroid impact. But without a crater, the hypothesis couldn’t be confirmed.
Piles of impact debris led crater hunters to the Caribbean. Eleven years after the Alvarez paper, scientists at last identified the smoking gun — the hidden crater.
It circled the coastal Mexican town of Chicxulub Puerto. (The crater actually had been discovered in the late 1970s by oil company scientists. They had used variations in Earth’s gravity to visualize the crater’s 180-kilometer- [110-mile-] wide outline. Word of that find, however, did not reach crater hunters for years.) Based in part on the gaping size of the depression, scientists estimated the size of the impact. They figured it must have released 10 billion times as much energy as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
That’s big.
Questions have remained, though, about how the impact might have caused so much death and destruction worldwide.
It now appears that the blast itself wasn’t the big killer in the impact scenario. It was the darkness that followed.
Inescapable night
The ground shook. Powerful gusts roiled the atmosphere. Debris rained from the sky. Soot and dust, spewed by the impact and resulting wildfires, filled the sky. That soot and dust then began to spread like a giant sunlight-blocking shade over the entire planet.How long did the darkness last? Some scientists had estimated that it was anywhere from a few months to years. But a new computer model is giving researchers a better sense of what happened.
It simulated the length and severity of the global cooldown. And it must have been truly dramatic, reports Clay Tabor. He works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. As a paleoclimatologist, he studies ancient climates. And he and his colleagues have reconstructed a sort of digital crime scene. It was one of the most detailed computer simulations ever made of the impact’s effect on climate.
The simulation begins by estimating the climate before the smash-up. The researchers determined what that climate might be from geologic evidence of ancient plants and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Then comes the soot. A high-end estimate of soot totals some 70 billion metric tons (about 77 billion U.S. short tons). That number is based on the size and global fallout of the impact. And it’s huge. It’s the equivalent weight of about 211,000 Empire State Buildings!
For two years, no light reached Earth’s surface, the simulation shows. Not any part of Earth’s surface! Global temperatures plummeted 16 degrees Celsius (30 degrees Fahrenheit). Arctic ice spread southward. Tabor shared this dramatic scenario in September 2016 in Denver, Colo. at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
Some areas would have been hit particularly hard, Tabor’s work suggests. The temperature nosedived in the Pacific Ocean, around the equator. Meanwhile, coastal Antarctica barely cooled. Inland areas generally fared worse than coastal ones. Those divides could help explain why some species and ecosystems weathered the impact while others died off, Tabor says.
Six years after the impact, sunshine returned to levels typical of conditions before the impact. Two years after that, land temperatures warmed to levels higher than had been typical before the impact. Then, all of the carbon flung into the air by the impact took effect. It acted like an insulating blanket over the planet. And the globe ultimately warmed several degrees more.
Evidence of the chilling darkness is in the rock record. Local sea surface temperatures modified lipid (fat) molecules in the membranes of ancient microbes. The fossilized remains of those lipids provide a temperature record, reports Johan Vellekoop. He is a geologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Fossilized lipids in what is now New Jersey suggest that temperatures there plummeted 3 degrees C (about 5 degrees F) following the impact. Vellekoop and colleagues shared their estimates in the June 2016 Geology.
Similar abrupt temperature drops plus darkened skies killed plants and other species that nourish the rest of the food web, Vellekoop says. “Dim the lights and the entire ecosystem collapses.”
The cold darkness was the impact’s deadliest weapon. Some unfortunate critters, though, died too soon to witness it.
Story continues below image.
Dinosaurs
ruled Earth until 66 million years ago. Then they disappeared in a mass
extinction that wiped out most of the planet’s species.
leonello/iStockphoto
Buried alive
An ancient graveyard covers swaths of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. It’s called the Hell Creek Formation. And it’s hundreds of square kilometers (square miles) of a fossil hunter’s paradise. Erosion has uncovered dinosaur bones. Some jut out of the ground, ready to be plucked and studied.Robert DePalma is a paleontologist with the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida. He’s worked in the dry Hell Creek badlands, thousands of kilometers (miles) away from the Chicxulub crater. And there he has found something surprising — signs of a tsunami.
Evidence of the supersized tsunami generated by the Chicxulub impact had previously been found only around the Gulf of Mexico. It had never been seen this far north or so far inland. But the symptoms of tsunami devastation were clear, DePalma says. The rushing water dumped sediment onto the landscape. The debris originated from the nearby Western Interior Seaway. This body of water once cut across North America from Texas to the Arctic Ocean.
The sediment contained iridium and glassy debris that formed from rock vaporized by the impact. It also contained fossils of sea species such as snaillike ammonites. They had been carried from the seaway.
And the evidence didn’t stop there.
At the geological society meeting last year, DePalma pulled up slides of fish fossils found inside the tsunami deposits. “These are the dead bodies,” he said. “If a [crime scene investigation] team walks over to a burnt-out building, how do they know if the guy died before or during the fire? You look for carbon and soot in the lungs. In this case, fish have gills, so we checked those out.”
The gills were packed with glass from the impact. That means the fish were alive and swimming when the asteroid hit. The fish had been alive up until the moment the tsunami pushed across the landscape. It crushed the fish under debris. Those unfortunate fish, DePalma says, are the first known direct victims of the Chicxulub impact.
A
fossil vertebra (a bone that makes up part of the spine) pokes through
rocks in the Hell Creek Formation. Scientists have found evidence in
this region that a massive tsunami killed off many organisms 66 million
years ago.
M. Readey/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Just under the fish-filled tsunami deposits was another amazing find: dinosaur tracks from two species. Jan Smit is an Earth scientist at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “These dinosaurs were running and alive before they were hit by the tsunami,” he says. “The entire ecosystem in Hell Creek was alive and kicking until the last moment. In no way was it on the decline.”
The new evidence from the Hell Creek Formation confirms that most of the deaths at the time were caused by the Chicxulub impact, Smit now argues. “I was 99 percent sure that it was the impact. And now that we’ve found this evidence, I’m 99.5 percent sure.”
While many other scientists share Smit’s certainty, a growing faction does not. Emerging evidence supports an alternative hypothesis for the dinosaurs’ demise. Their downfall may have come at least partly from deep within the Earth.
Death from below
Long before the Chicxulub impact, a different disaster was underway on the other side of the planet. Back then, India was its own landmass near Madagascar (off of the East Coast of what is now Africa). The Deccan volcanic eruptions there would ultimately belch out some 1.3 million cubic kilometers (300,000 cubic miles) of molten rock and debris. That’s more than enough material to bury Alaska to the height of the world’s tallest skyscraper. Gases spewed by similar volcanic outpourings have been linked to other major extinction events.
Deccan
volcanic eruptions spewed more than a million cubic kilometers (240,000
cubic miles) of molten rock and debris in what is now India. The
outpourings started before and ran after the Chicxulub impact. They may
have contributed to the mass extinction that ended the reign of the
dinosaurs.
Mark Richards
This new timeline lends credence to those who doubt that the Chicxulub impact was the chief cause of the extinction event.
“Deccan volcanism is vastly more dangerous to life on Earth than an impact,” says Gerta Keller. She is a paleontologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. Recent research is showing just how detrimental. In the same way that iridium marks fallout from the Chicxulub impact, the Deccan volcanism has a calling card of its own. It is the element mercury.
Most mercury in the environment originated from volcanoes. Large eruptions cough up tons of the element. Deccan was no exception. The bulk of the Deccan eruptions released a total of between 99 million and 178 million metric tons (about 109 million and 196 million U.S. short tons) of mercury. Chicxulub released just a fraction of that.
All that mercury left a mark. It shows up in southwestern France and elsewhere. A research team discovered lots of mercury, for instance, in sediment laid down before the impact. Those same sediments held another clue as well — the fossilized shells of plankton (small floating sea organisms) from the dinosaur days. Unlike healthy shells, these specimens are thin and cracked. The researchers reported this in the February 2016 Geology.
The shell pieces suggest that carbon dioxide released by the Deccan eruptions made the oceans too acidic for some creatures, says Thierry Adatte. He is a geoscientist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He coauthored the study with Keller.
“Survival was getting very difficult for these critters,” Keller says. Plankton form the foundation of the ocean ecosystem. Their decline rattled the entire food web, she suspects. (A similar trend is happening today as seawater soaks up carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.) And as waters turned more acidic, it took the animals more energy to make their shells.
Partners in crime
The Deccan eruptions wreaked havoc in at least part of Antarctica. Researchers analyzed the chemical makeup of shells from 29 clamlike shellfish species on the continent’s Seymour Island. The shells’ chemicals differ depending on the temperature at the time they were made. That let the researchers assemble a roughly 3.5-million-year record of how Antarctic temperatures changed around the time of the dinosaur extinction.
These are 65-million-year-old Cucullaea antarctica shells. They hold chemical clues of a temperature change during the extinction event.
S.V. Petersen
About 150,000 years later, a second, smaller warming phase coincided with the Chicxulub impact. Both of these warming periods corresponded with high extinction rates on the island.
“Everyone wasn’t just living happily, and then boom, this impact came out of nowhere,” says Sierra Petersen. She is a geochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She also worked on this study. Plants and animals “were already under stress and not having a great day. And this impact happens and pushes them over the top,” she says.
Both catastrophic events were major contributors to the extinctions. “Either one would have caused some extinction,” she says. “But such a mass extinction is due to a combination of both events,” she now concludes.
Not everyone agrees.
Noting that some parts of the world were affected by the Deccan eruptions before the impact is not enough to show that life overall was stressed back then, says Joanna Morgan. She is a geophysicist at Imperial College London in England. Fossil evidence in many areas, she says, suggests that sea life flourished until the impact.
But maybe bad luck wasn’t the reason the dinosaurs encountered two devastating disasters at once. Maybe the impact and the volcanism were related, some researchers propose. The idea isn’t an attempt to get impact purists and the volcano devotees to play nice. Volcanoes often erupt after major earthquakes. This happened in 1960. The Cordón-Caulle eruption in Chile started two days after a nearby magnitude-9.5 quake. The seismic shock waves from the Chicxulub impact potentially reached even higher — a magnitude 10 or more, Renne says.
He and his colleagues have traced the intensity of the volcanism during the time of the impact. Eruptions before and after it went on uninterrupted for 91,000 years. Renne reported that last April at a meeting in Vienna, Austria of the European Geosciences Union. The nature of the eruptions, however, changed within 50,000 years before or after the impact. The amount of erupted material jumped from 0.2 to 0.6 cubic kilometer (0.05 to 0.14 cubic mile) annually. Something must have altered the volcanic plumbing, he says.
In 2015, Renne and his team formally outlined their one-two punch extinction hypothesis in Science. The shock of the impact fractured the rock enclosing the Deccan magma, they proposed. That allowed the molten rock to expand and possibly enlarge or combine magma chambers. Dissolved gases in the magma formed bubbles. Those bubbles propelled material upward like in a shaken soda can.
The physics behind this impact-volcano combo is not firm, say scientists on both sides of the debate. That’s true especially because Deccan and the impact site were so distant from each other. “This is all guesswork and perhaps wishful thinking,” Princeton’s Keller says.
Sean Gulick also isn’t convinced. He says the evidence isn’t there. He is a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re hunting for another explanation when there’s already an obvious one,” he says. “The impact did it alone.”
Over the coming months and years, improved computer simulations of the dinosaur doomsday — and ongoing studies of Chicxulub and Deccan rocks — could further shake up the debate. For now, a definitive guilty verdict on either accused killer would be difficult, Renne predicts.
Both events devastated the planet in similar ways at around the same time. “It’s no longer easy to distinguish between the two,” he says. For now, at least, the case of the dinosaur killer will remain an unsolved mystery.
Power Words
(for more about Power Words, click here)
acidic An adjective for materials that contain acid. These materials often are capable of eating away at some minerals such as carbonate, or preventing their formation in the first place.
annual Adjective for something that happens in every year.
Antarctica A continent mostly covered in ice, which sits in the southernmost part of the world.
Arctic A region that falls within the Arctic Circle. The edge of that circle is defined as the northernmost point at which the sun is visible on the northern winter solstice and the southernmost point at which the midnight sun can be seen on the northern summer solstice.
asteroid A rocky object in orbit around the sun. Most orbit in a region that falls between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers refer to this region as the asteroid belt.
atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.
bivalve An invertebrate that lives in a two-part, hinged shell. Most bivalves filter their food from the waters that slosh past them. Bivalves include clams, oysters, scallops and mussels.
carbon The chemical element having the atomic number 6. It is the physical basis of all life on Earth. Carbon exists freely as graphite and diamond. It is an important part of coal, limestone and petroleum, and is capable of self-bonding, chemically, to form an enormous number of chemically, biologically and commercially important molecules.
carbon dioxide (or CO2) A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they’ve eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter (including fossil fuels like oil or gas) is burned. Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.
chemical A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (become bonded together) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Its chemical symbol is H2O. Chemical can also be an adjective that describes properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.
Chicxulub The name given an asteroid (or possibly a comet) that crashed into Earth around 66 million years ago. It left a crater more than 180 kilometers (110 miles) wide near the town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The collision released an immense amount of energy — equivalent to billions of atom bombs the size of those dropped on Japan during World War II. This event changed the planet’s climate and is widely believed to have triggered a mass extinction of species — including the end of the dinosaurs.
clay Fine-grained particles of soil that stick together and can be molded when wet. When fired under intense heat, clay can become hard and brittle. That’s why it’s used to fashion pottery and bricks.
climate The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.
climate change Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.
coauthor One of a group (two or more people) who together had prepared a written work, such as a book, report or research paper. Not all coauthors may have contributed equally.
colleague Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.
comet A celestial object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust. When a comet passes near the sun, gas and dust vaporize off the comet’s surface, creating its trailing “tail.”
computer model A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event.
continent (in geology) The huge land masses that sit upon tectonic plates. In modern times, there are six geologic continents: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica.
crater A large, bowl-shaped cavity in the ground or on the surface of a planet or the moon. They are typically caused by an explosion or the impact of a meteorite or other celestial body. Such an impact is sometimes referred to as a cratering event.
Cretaceous A geologic time period that included the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. It ran from roughly 145.5 million years ago until 65.5 million years ago.
crust (in geology) Earth’s outermost surface, usually made from dense, solid rock.
crystal (adj. crystalline ) A solid consisting of a symmetrical, ordered, three-dimensional arrangement of atoms or molecules. It’s the organized structure taken by most minerals. Apatite, for example, forms six-sided crystals. The mineral crystals that make up rock are usually too small to be seen with the unaided eye.
debris Scattered fragments, typically of trash or of something that has been destroyed. Space debris, for instance, includes the wreckage of defunct satellites and spacecraft.
depression A low spot, such as in a field or the surface of a rock.
dinosaur A term that means terrible lizard. These ancient reptiles lived from about 250 million years ago to roughly 65 million years ago. All descended from egg-laying reptiles known as archosaurs. Their descendants eventually split into two lines. They are distinguished by their hips. The lizard-hipped line became saurichians, such as two-footed theropods like T. rex and the lumbering four-footed Apatosaurus (once known as brontosaurus). A second line of so-called bird-hipped, or ornithischian dinosaurs, led to a widely differing group of animals that included the stegosaurs and duckbilled dinosaurs.
Earth’s crust The outermost layer of Earth. It is relatively cold and brittle.
ecosystem A group of interacting living organisms — including microorganisms, plants and animals — and their physical environment within a particular climate. Examples include tropical reefs, rainforests, alpine meadows and polar tundra.
element (in chemistry) Each of more than one hundred substances for which the smallest unit of each is a single atom. Examples include hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, lithium and uranium.
environment The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create for that organism or process. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature, humidity and placement of components in some electronics system or product.
equator An imaginary line around Earth that divides Earth into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
erosion (v. erode) The process that removes rock and soil from one spot on Earth’s surface, depositing it elsewhere. Erosion can be exceptionally fast or exceedingly slow. Causes of erosion include wind, water (including rainfall and floods), the scouring action of glaciers and the repeated cycles of freezing and thawing that occur in many areas of the world.
eruption (in geoscience) The sudden bursting or spraying of hot material from deep inside a planet or moon and out through its surface. Volcanic eruptions on Earth usually send hot lava, hot gases or ash into the air and across surrounding land.
extinct An adjective that describes a species for which there are no living members.
extinction The permanent loss of a species, family or larger group of organisms.
food web (also known as a food chain ) The network of relationships among organisms sharing an ecosystem. M ember organisms depend on others within this network as a source of food.
fossil Any preserved remains or traces of ancient life. There are many different types of fossils: The bones and other body parts of dinosaurs are called “body fossils.” Things like footprints are called “trace fossils.” Even specimens of dinosaur poop are fossils. The process of forming fossils is called fossilization.
fossil fuel Any fuel — such as coal, petroleum (crude oil) or natural gas — that has developed in the Earth over millions of years from the decayed remains of bacteria, plants or animals.
geochronology The study of the age of rocks. Geochronologists often use known rates of radioactive decay of elements in rocks to determine the age of the rock.
geological Adjective to describe things related to Earth’s physical structure and substance, its history and the processes that act on it. People who work in this field are known as geologists.
geoscience Any of a number of sciences, like geology or atmospheric science, concerned with better understanding the planet. People who work in this field are known as geoscientists.
gills The respiratory organ of most aquatic animals that that filters oxygen out of water, which fish and other water-dwelling animals use to breathe.
glass A hard, brittle substance made from silica, a mineral found in sand . Glass usually is transparent and fairly inert (chemically nonreactive). Aquatic organisms called diatoms build their shells with it.
hypothesis A proposed explanation for a phenomenon. In science, a hypothesis is an idea that must be rigorously tested before it is accepted or rejected.
iridium Discovered in 1803, its name comes from the Latin for rainbow. It’s a hard, brittle and corrosion-resistant metal in the platinum family. Slightly yellowish, the principle use for this element is as a hardener for platinum. Indeed, its melting point is more than 2,400° Celsius (4,350° Fahrenheit). The element’s atomic number is 77.
landmass A continent, large island or other continuous body of land.
lava Molten rock that comes up from the mantle, through Earth’s crust, and out of a volcano.
lipid A type of fat.
magma The molten rock that resides under Earth’s crust. When it erupts from a volcano, this material is referred to as lava.
magnitude (in geology) A number used to describe the relative size of an earthquake. It runs from 1 to more than 8 and is calculated by the peak ground motion as recorded by seismographs. There are several magnitude scales. One of the more commonly used ones today is known as the moment magnitude. It’s based on the size of a fault (crack in Earth’s crust), how much the fault slips (moves) during a quake, and the energy force that was required to permit that movement. For each increase in magnitude, an earthquake produces 10 times more ground motion and releases about 32 times more energy. For perspective, a magnitude 8 quake can release energy equivalent to detonating 6 million tons of TNT.
membrane A barrier which blocks the passage (or flow through of) some materials depending on their size or other features. Membranes are an integral part of filtration systems. Many serve that same function as the outer covering of cells or organs of a body.
mercury Sometimes called quicksilver, mercury is an element with the atomic number 80. At room temperature, this silvery metal is a liquid. Mercury is also very toxic.
microbe Short for microorganism. A living thing that is too small to see with the unaided eye, including bacteria, some fungi and many other organisms such as amoebas. Most consist of a single cell.
microscopic An adjective for things too small to be seen by the unaided eye. It takes a microscope to view such tiny objects, such as bacteria or other one-celled organisms.
molecule An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O2), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O).
molten A word describing something that is melted, such as the liquid rock that makes up lava.
Pacific The largest of the world’s five oceans. It separates Asia and Australia to the west from North and South America to the east.
Paleogene That part of the Tertiary Period that ran from 66 million to 23 million years ago.
paleontologist A scientist who specializes in studying fossils, the remains of ancient organisms.
physics The scientific study of the nature and properties of matter and energy. Classical physics is an explanation of the nature and properties of matter and energy that relies on descriptions such as Newton’s laws of motion. Quantum physics, a field of study which emerged later, is a more accurate way of explaining the motions and behavior of matter. A scientist who works in that field is known as a physicist.
plague A term for any horrific infection that spreads easily and kills many people, usually quickly. Best known are the infections caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Indeed, they are commonly referred to simply as the plague. In one form, people pick up the germ from the bite of infected fleas. This inflames the lymph nodes, causing them to swell. Those swollen tissues, called buboes, give this form of the disease its name: bubonic plague. When the disease is instead transmitted by inhaling the bacteria, people develop what’s known as pneumonic plague. This form of the disease can be spread when sick people cough. Pneumonic plague is the most deadly form, often killing its victims within 24 hours.
plankton A small organism that drifts or floats in the sea. Depending on the species, plankton range from microscopic sizes to organisms about the size of a flea. Some are tiny animals. Others are plantlike organisms. Although individual plankton are very small, they form massive colonies, numbering in the billions. The largest animal in the world, the blue whale, lives on plankton.
scenario An imagined situation of how events or conditions might play out.
sea An ocean (or region that is part of an ocean). Unlike lakes and streams, seawater — or ocean water — is salty.
sediment Material (such as stones and sand) deposited by water, wind or glaciers.
shock waves Tiny regions in a gas or fluid where properties of the host material change dramatically owing to the passage of some object (which could be a plane in air or merely bubbles in water). Across a shock wave, a region’s pressure, temperature and density spike briefly, and almost instantaneously.
simulation (v. simulate) An analysis, often made using a computer, of some conditions, functions or appearance of a physical system. A computer program would do this by using mathematical operations that can describe the system and how it might vary in response to various situations or over time.
soot Also known as black carbon particles, these are the residues of incompletely burned materials, from plastics, leaves and wood to coal, oil and other fossil fuels. The particles can be quite small — nanometers in diameter. If inhaled, they can end up deep within the lung.
species A group of similar organisms capable of producing offspring that can survive and reproduce.
stress (in biology) A factor, such as unusual temperatures, moisture or pollution, that affects the health of a species or ecosystem.
supernova (plural: supernovae or supernovas) A massive star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass.
symptom A physical or mental indicator generally regarded to be characteristic of a disease. Sometimes a single symptom — especially a general one, such as fever or pain — can be a sign of any of many different types of injury or disease.
Texas The second largest state in the United States, located along the southern border with Mexico. It is about 1,270 kilometers (790 miles) long and covers an area of 696,000 square kilometers (268,581 square miles).
tsunami One or many long, high sea waves caused by an earthquake, submarine landslide or other disturbance.
Tyrannosaurus rex A top-predator dinosaur that roamed Earth during the late Cretaceous period. Adults could be 12 meters (40 feet) long.
volcanism The processes by which volcanoes form and change over time. Scientists who study this are known as volcanologists and their field of science is known as volcanology .
Western Interior Seaway This shallow marine sea, sometimes called the Cretaceous Seaway, split North America into two landmasses: Laramidia to the West and Appalachia to the East.
acidic An adjective for materials that contain acid. These materials often are capable of eating away at some minerals such as carbonate, or preventing their formation in the first place.
annual Adjective for something that happens in every year.
Antarctica A continent mostly covered in ice, which sits in the southernmost part of the world.
Arctic A region that falls within the Arctic Circle. The edge of that circle is defined as the northernmost point at which the sun is visible on the northern winter solstice and the southernmost point at which the midnight sun can be seen on the northern summer solstice.
asteroid A rocky object in orbit around the sun. Most orbit in a region that falls between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers refer to this region as the asteroid belt.
atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.
bivalve An invertebrate that lives in a two-part, hinged shell. Most bivalves filter their food from the waters that slosh past them. Bivalves include clams, oysters, scallops and mussels.
carbon The chemical element having the atomic number 6. It is the physical basis of all life on Earth. Carbon exists freely as graphite and diamond. It is an important part of coal, limestone and petroleum, and is capable of self-bonding, chemically, to form an enormous number of chemically, biologically and commercially important molecules.
carbon dioxide (or CO2) A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they’ve eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter (including fossil fuels like oil or gas) is burned. Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.
chemical A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (become bonded together) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Its chemical symbol is H2O. Chemical can also be an adjective that describes properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.
Chicxulub The name given an asteroid (or possibly a comet) that crashed into Earth around 66 million years ago. It left a crater more than 180 kilometers (110 miles) wide near the town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The collision released an immense amount of energy — equivalent to billions of atom bombs the size of those dropped on Japan during World War II. This event changed the planet’s climate and is widely believed to have triggered a mass extinction of species — including the end of the dinosaurs.
clay Fine-grained particles of soil that stick together and can be molded when wet. When fired under intense heat, clay can become hard and brittle. That’s why it’s used to fashion pottery and bricks.
climate The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.
climate change Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.
coauthor One of a group (two or more people) who together had prepared a written work, such as a book, report or research paper. Not all coauthors may have contributed equally.
colleague Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.
comet A celestial object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust. When a comet passes near the sun, gas and dust vaporize off the comet’s surface, creating its trailing “tail.”
computer model A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event.
continent (in geology) The huge land masses that sit upon tectonic plates. In modern times, there are six geologic continents: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica.
crater A large, bowl-shaped cavity in the ground or on the surface of a planet or the moon. They are typically caused by an explosion or the impact of a meteorite or other celestial body. Such an impact is sometimes referred to as a cratering event.
Cretaceous A geologic time period that included the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. It ran from roughly 145.5 million years ago until 65.5 million years ago.
crust (in geology) Earth’s outermost surface, usually made from dense, solid rock.
crystal (adj. crystalline ) A solid consisting of a symmetrical, ordered, three-dimensional arrangement of atoms or molecules. It’s the organized structure taken by most minerals. Apatite, for example, forms six-sided crystals. The mineral crystals that make up rock are usually too small to be seen with the unaided eye.
debris Scattered fragments, typically of trash or of something that has been destroyed. Space debris, for instance, includes the wreckage of defunct satellites and spacecraft.
depression A low spot, such as in a field or the surface of a rock.
dinosaur A term that means terrible lizard. These ancient reptiles lived from about 250 million years ago to roughly 65 million years ago. All descended from egg-laying reptiles known as archosaurs. Their descendants eventually split into two lines. They are distinguished by their hips. The lizard-hipped line became saurichians, such as two-footed theropods like T. rex and the lumbering four-footed Apatosaurus (once known as brontosaurus). A second line of so-called bird-hipped, or ornithischian dinosaurs, led to a widely differing group of animals that included the stegosaurs and duckbilled dinosaurs.
Earth’s crust The outermost layer of Earth. It is relatively cold and brittle.
ecosystem A group of interacting living organisms — including microorganisms, plants and animals — and their physical environment within a particular climate. Examples include tropical reefs, rainforests, alpine meadows and polar tundra.
element (in chemistry) Each of more than one hundred substances for which the smallest unit of each is a single atom. Examples include hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, lithium and uranium.
environment The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create for that organism or process. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature, humidity and placement of components in some electronics system or product.
equator An imaginary line around Earth that divides Earth into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
erosion (v. erode) The process that removes rock and soil from one spot on Earth’s surface, depositing it elsewhere. Erosion can be exceptionally fast or exceedingly slow. Causes of erosion include wind, water (including rainfall and floods), the scouring action of glaciers and the repeated cycles of freezing and thawing that occur in many areas of the world.
eruption (in geoscience) The sudden bursting or spraying of hot material from deep inside a planet or moon and out through its surface. Volcanic eruptions on Earth usually send hot lava, hot gases or ash into the air and across surrounding land.
extinct An adjective that describes a species for which there are no living members.
extinction The permanent loss of a species, family or larger group of organisms.
food web (also known as a food chain ) The network of relationships among organisms sharing an ecosystem. M ember organisms depend on others within this network as a source of food.
fossil Any preserved remains or traces of ancient life. There are many different types of fossils: The bones and other body parts of dinosaurs are called “body fossils.” Things like footprints are called “trace fossils.” Even specimens of dinosaur poop are fossils. The process of forming fossils is called fossilization.
fossil fuel Any fuel — such as coal, petroleum (crude oil) or natural gas — that has developed in the Earth over millions of years from the decayed remains of bacteria, plants or animals.
geochronology The study of the age of rocks. Geochronologists often use known rates of radioactive decay of elements in rocks to determine the age of the rock.
geological Adjective to describe things related to Earth’s physical structure and substance, its history and the processes that act on it. People who work in this field are known as geologists.
geoscience Any of a number of sciences, like geology or atmospheric science, concerned with better understanding the planet. People who work in this field are known as geoscientists.
gills The respiratory organ of most aquatic animals that that filters oxygen out of water, which fish and other water-dwelling animals use to breathe.
glass A hard, brittle substance made from silica, a mineral found in sand . Glass usually is transparent and fairly inert (chemically nonreactive). Aquatic organisms called diatoms build their shells with it.
hypothesis A proposed explanation for a phenomenon. In science, a hypothesis is an idea that must be rigorously tested before it is accepted or rejected.
iridium Discovered in 1803, its name comes from the Latin for rainbow. It’s a hard, brittle and corrosion-resistant metal in the platinum family. Slightly yellowish, the principle use for this element is as a hardener for platinum. Indeed, its melting point is more than 2,400° Celsius (4,350° Fahrenheit). The element’s atomic number is 77.
landmass A continent, large island or other continuous body of land.
lava Molten rock that comes up from the mantle, through Earth’s crust, and out of a volcano.
lipid A type of fat.
magma The molten rock that resides under Earth’s crust. When it erupts from a volcano, this material is referred to as lava.
magnitude (in geology) A number used to describe the relative size of an earthquake. It runs from 1 to more than 8 and is calculated by the peak ground motion as recorded by seismographs. There are several magnitude scales. One of the more commonly used ones today is known as the moment magnitude. It’s based on the size of a fault (crack in Earth’s crust), how much the fault slips (moves) during a quake, and the energy force that was required to permit that movement. For each increase in magnitude, an earthquake produces 10 times more ground motion and releases about 32 times more energy. For perspective, a magnitude 8 quake can release energy equivalent to detonating 6 million tons of TNT.
membrane A barrier which blocks the passage (or flow through of) some materials depending on their size or other features. Membranes are an integral part of filtration systems. Many serve that same function as the outer covering of cells or organs of a body.
mercury Sometimes called quicksilver, mercury is an element with the atomic number 80. At room temperature, this silvery metal is a liquid. Mercury is also very toxic.
microbe Short for microorganism. A living thing that is too small to see with the unaided eye, including bacteria, some fungi and many other organisms such as amoebas. Most consist of a single cell.
microscopic An adjective for things too small to be seen by the unaided eye. It takes a microscope to view such tiny objects, such as bacteria or other one-celled organisms.
molecule An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O2), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O).
molten A word describing something that is melted, such as the liquid rock that makes up lava.
Pacific The largest of the world’s five oceans. It separates Asia and Australia to the west from North and South America to the east.
Paleogene That part of the Tertiary Period that ran from 66 million to 23 million years ago.
paleontologist A scientist who specializes in studying fossils, the remains of ancient organisms.
physics The scientific study of the nature and properties of matter and energy. Classical physics is an explanation of the nature and properties of matter and energy that relies on descriptions such as Newton’s laws of motion. Quantum physics, a field of study which emerged later, is a more accurate way of explaining the motions and behavior of matter. A scientist who works in that field is known as a physicist.
plague A term for any horrific infection that spreads easily and kills many people, usually quickly. Best known are the infections caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Indeed, they are commonly referred to simply as the plague. In one form, people pick up the germ from the bite of infected fleas. This inflames the lymph nodes, causing them to swell. Those swollen tissues, called buboes, give this form of the disease its name: bubonic plague. When the disease is instead transmitted by inhaling the bacteria, people develop what’s known as pneumonic plague. This form of the disease can be spread when sick people cough. Pneumonic plague is the most deadly form, often killing its victims within 24 hours.
plankton A small organism that drifts or floats in the sea. Depending on the species, plankton range from microscopic sizes to organisms about the size of a flea. Some are tiny animals. Others are plantlike organisms. Although individual plankton are very small, they form massive colonies, numbering in the billions. The largest animal in the world, the blue whale, lives on plankton.
scenario An imagined situation of how events or conditions might play out.
sea An ocean (or region that is part of an ocean). Unlike lakes and streams, seawater — or ocean water — is salty.
sediment Material (such as stones and sand) deposited by water, wind or glaciers.
shock waves Tiny regions in a gas or fluid where properties of the host material change dramatically owing to the passage of some object (which could be a plane in air or merely bubbles in water). Across a shock wave, a region’s pressure, temperature and density spike briefly, and almost instantaneously.
simulation (v. simulate) An analysis, often made using a computer, of some conditions, functions or appearance of a physical system. A computer program would do this by using mathematical operations that can describe the system and how it might vary in response to various situations or over time.
soot Also known as black carbon particles, these are the residues of incompletely burned materials, from plastics, leaves and wood to coal, oil and other fossil fuels. The particles can be quite small — nanometers in diameter. If inhaled, they can end up deep within the lung.
species A group of similar organisms capable of producing offspring that can survive and reproduce.
stress (in biology) A factor, such as unusual temperatures, moisture or pollution, that affects the health of a species or ecosystem.
supernova (plural: supernovae or supernovas) A massive star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass.
symptom A physical or mental indicator generally regarded to be characteristic of a disease. Sometimes a single symptom — especially a general one, such as fever or pain — can be a sign of any of many different types of injury or disease.
Texas The second largest state in the United States, located along the southern border with Mexico. It is about 1,270 kilometers (790 miles) long and covers an area of 696,000 square kilometers (268,581 square miles).
tsunami One or many long, high sea waves caused by an earthquake, submarine landslide or other disturbance.
Tyrannosaurus rex A top-predator dinosaur that roamed Earth during the late Cretaceous period. Adults could be 12 meters (40 feet) long.
volcanism The processes by which volcanoes form and change over time. Scientists who study this are known as volcanologists and their field of science is known as volcanology .
Western Interior Seaway This shallow marine sea, sometimes called the Cretaceous Seaway, split North America into two landmasses: Laramidia to the West and Appalachia to the East.
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