How old is the k t boundary

Clary makes the case that there was no Chicxulub meteorite impact. Personally, I would explain the layer itself in the same way the layers above and below would be explained by creationist geologists. They are the result of the Genesis global Flood about years ago. Also, volcanoes produce iridium as well, and most creationist models for the Flood include massive amounts of volcanism. So, the Flood can explain the layer and the iridium. The Bible tells us that dinosaurs were on the ark.

We know this since we know that dinosaurs were animals. That fact and the historical evidences of dragons now called dinosaurs abounding well into the Middle Ages, support the biblical idea that dinosaurs did not go extinct 65 million years ago as the secularists hypothesize.

Dinosaurs evidently came off the ark and were unable to thrive or adapt due to various factors. Probably the major factor was the deleterious actions of man toward them. Some people today still believe they have evidence that dinosaurs and I do not mean birds are still alive in the remotest parts of the earth. Remember that according to the Bible, birds were created on day 5 ahead of the dinosaurs, and so the dinosaurs could not have evolved into birds—they already existed when the animals came on the scene.

In , an international team of paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History and the Mongolia Academy of Science made some great fossil discoveries in the Gobi Desert at the Flaming Cliffs in Mongolia. Upon their return the Americans reported on some of their finds in the December, issue of Scientific American vol. Consider this quote from that article:. Thus, geologists cannot determine the age of these strata by analyzing their proportions of radioactive isotopes.

Although the Gobi is richly endowed with early Tertiary mammal faunas, there seems to be a gap of at least several million years between these and the late Cretaceous dinosaur faunas. Iridium is rare on Earth because it sank down into the center of the planet as it formed, but iridium can still be found in large concentrations in asteroids. When they compared the concentrations of iridium in the K-T boundary, they found it matched the levels found in meteorites.

The researchers were even able to estimate what kind of asteroid must have impacted the Earth They estimated that the impactor must have been about 10 km in diameter, and release the energy equivalent of trillion tons of TNT. When that asteroid struck the Earth That blocked photosynthesis in plants — the base of the food chain — and eventually starved out the dinosaurs. Researchers now think that the asteroid strike that created the K-T boundary was probably the Chicxulub Crater.

This is a massive impact crater buried under Chicxulub on the coast of Yucatan, Mexico. The glass is formed as the target rock is melted in the impact, blasted into the air as a spray of droplets, and almost immediately frozen. Over geological time, the glass spherules may decay to clay. Shocked quartz is formed when quartz crystals undergo a sudden pulse of great pressure.

If they are not heated enough to melt, they may carry peculiar and unmistakable microstructures Figure It is only a few millimeters thick, but in total it contains more than a cubic kilometer of shocked quartz in North America alone. The zone of shocked quartz extends west onto the Pacific Ocean floor, but shocked quartz is rare in K-T boundary rocks elsewhere: some very tiny fragments occur in European sites. All this evidence implies that the K-T impact occurred on or near North America, with the iridium coming from the vaporized asteroid and the shocked quartz coming from the continental rocks it hit.

The K-T impact crater has now been found. The structure is about km across, one of the largest impact structures so far identified with confidence on Earth. A borehole drilled into the Chicxulub structure hit meters more than feet of igneous rock with a strange chemistry. That chemistry could have been generated by melting together a mixture of the sedimentary rocks in the region. The igneous rock under Chicxulub contains high levels of iridium, and its age is 65 Ma, exactly coinciding with the K-T boundary.

On top of the igneous rock lies a mass of broken rock, probably the largest surviving debris particles that fell back on to the crater without melting, and on top of that are normal sediments that formed slowly to fill the crater in the shallow tropical seas that covered the impact area. Well-known impact craters often have tektites associated with them as well as shocked quartz and tiny glass spherules. Tektites are larger glass beads with unusual shapes and surface textures.

They are formed when rocks are instantaneously melted and splashed out of impact sites in the form of big gobbets of molten glass, then cooled while spinning through the air.

Haiti was about km from Chicxulub at the end of the Cretaceous Figure At Beloc and other localities in Haiti, the K-T boundary is marked by a normal but thick 30 cm clay boundary layer that consists mainly of glass spherules Figure The clay is overlain by a layer of turbidite, submarine landslide material that contains large rock fragments.

Some of the fragments look like shattered ocean crust, but there are also spherical pieces of yellow and black glass up to 8 mm across that are unmistakably tektites.

The black tektites formed from continental volcanic rocks and the yellow ones from evaporite sediments with a high content of sulfate and carbonate. Above the turbidite comes a thin red clay layer only about mm thick that contains iridium and shocked quartz. One can explain much of this evidence as follows: an asteroid struck at Chicxulub, hitting a pile of thick sediments in a shallow sea. The impact melted much of the local crust and blasted molten material outward from as deep as 14 km under the surface.

Small spherules of molten glass were blasted into the air at a shallow angle, and fell out over a giant area that extended northeast as far as Haiti, several hundred kilometers away, and to the northwest as far as Colorado. Next followed the finer material that had been blasted higher into the atmosphere or out into space and fell more slowly on top of the coarser fragments.

This accounts in particular for the tremendous damage to the North American continent, and the skewed distribution of shocked quartz far out into the Pacific. Other sites in the western Caribbean suggest that normally quiet, deep-water sediments were drastically disturbed right at the end of the Cretaceous, and the disturbed sediments have the iridium-bearing layer right on top of them. At many sites from northern Mexico and Texas, and at two sites drilled on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, there are signs of a great disturbance in the ocean at the K-T boundary.

In some places, the disturbed seafloor sediments contain fossils of fresh leaves and wood from land plants, along with tektites dated at 65 Ma Figure Around the Caribbean and at sites up the Eastern Atlantic coast of the United States, existing Cretaceous sediments were torn up and settled out again in a messy pile that also contains glass spherules of different chemistries, shocked quartz fragments, and an iridium spike.

All this implies that a great tsunami or tidal wave affected the ocean margin of the time, washing fresh land plants well out to sea and tearing up seafloor sediments that had lain undisturbed for millions of years. The resulting bizarre mixture of rocks has been called "the Cretaceous-Tertiary cocktail.

This first hot fireball blew vaporized and molten debris including glass spherules and iridium high above the atmosphere to be deposited last and globally as it slowly drifted downward.