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A more recent theory combining both Deccan volcanism and the impact hypothesis has been developed by teams at UC Berkeley led by Paul Renne and Mark Richards. This theory proposes that the impact itself instigated the most intense period of Deccan eruptions, both of which had devastating effects contributing to the K-Pg extinction.
Some critics of the impact theory have put forward that the impact precedes the mass extinction by about 300,000 years and thus was not its cause. [208] [209] However, in a 2013 paper, Paul Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center dated the impact at 66.043 ± 0.011 million years ago, based on argon–argon dating.
Ursula Marvin argued that the asteroid impact explanation for the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was at odds with the idea of uniformitarianism and criticized those who attempt to reconcile the two as engaging in "newspeak". [95] Alvarez and Asaro measured the iridium levels of a 57m span of rock near the K–T boundary at Gubbio once more.
However, the most widely accepted theory for the mass extinction is that an asteroid (or, perhaps a comet) at least 10 kilometers in diameter crashed near modern-day Chicxulub on the Yucatán ...
It has been a long-held belief that it was the impact of an asteroid that ended the age of dinosaurs, but researchers have revealed that the one key element may have played a larger part than ...
The first breakthrough was published in 1980 by a team led by Luis Alvarez, who discovered trace metal evidence for an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period. The Alvarez hypothesis for the end-Cretaceous extinction gave mass extinctions, and catastrophic explanations, newfound popular and scientific attention. [46]
A study reveals the chemical makeup of the Chicxulub asteroid that collided with Earth and resulted in the extinction of nearly all dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Dinosaur-killing asteroid was ...
For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs was long thought to be a gradual process, but evidence collected since the late 1980s suggests it was abrupt, which is consistent with the idea that an asteroid impact caused it. The uncertainty about when a taxon first appeared makes it difficult to be confident about the ancestry of specific genera ...