Word: kellers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...controversial paper was written by geoscientists Gerta Keller of Princeton University and Thierry Addate of the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland. Both researchers knew that challenging the impact doctrine would not be easy. The asteroid charged with killing the dinosaurs, after all, left more than the Chicxulub crater as its calling card. At the same 65-million-year depth, the geologic record reveals that a thin layer of iridium was deposited pretty much everywhere in the world. Iridium is an element that's rare on Earth but common in asteroids, and a fine global dusting of the stuff is precisely...
...Keller and Addate worried that we were misreading both the geologic and fossil records. They conducted surveys at numerous sites in Mexico, including a spot called El Peñón, near the impact crater. They were especially interested in a 30-ft. layer of sediment just above the iridium layer. That sediment, they calculate, was laid down at a rate of about 0.8 in. to 1.2 in. per thousand years, meaning that all 30 feet took 300,000 years to settle into place...
...mass extinction level can be seen above this interval," Keller says. "Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact...
...Keller's and Addate's species samplings are not, of course, conclusive, and plenty of other surveys since 1978 do tie the extinctions closely to the asteroid. But since the new digs were so close to ground zero, the immediate species loss ought to be have been - if anything - greater there than anywhere else in the world. Instead, the animals seemed to escape unharmed. Other paleontologists, however, believe that the very proximity of El Peñón to the impact site makes the results even less reliable. Earthquakes and tsunamis that resulted from the collision could have wrought havoc...
...Mohammed-meaning we may never know the final wages of what CIA agents did in dark rooms under our name. But there should be no doubt now that we tortured. "That we would still be having a discussion about whether or not waterboarding is torture is so disingenuous," says Keller. "They should come out and say what...