AZ4-Wednesday, February 13, 1980 - North Shore News

the dinasaurs demise

Choking to death in semi-darkness

SAN FRANCISCO (UPD - A
team of scientists is
proposing that dinosaurs
were wiped out 65 million
years ago by a spectacular
collision of Earth with an
asteroid that cast the globe
into several years of dust-
choked semi-darkness.

This new hypothesis
would explain why 75 per
cent of all living species
disappeared at the same
time. The idea was advanced
al the annual meeting of the
American Association for
the Advancement of
Science,

The most common ex-
planation for the globai
catastrophe has been that
water retreating from the
continental shelves caused
climactic changes to which
the dinosaurs could not
adjust.

A recent theory suggests
that the climactic changes
were caused by a massive
invasion into the oceans of
fresh water from the Arctic
Basin.

But Dale A. Russell, a
Canadian paleontologist,
toid a symposium that no
physical evidence exists to
support the notion of sharp
temperature declines.

The new hypothesis was
explained by Luiz W.
Alvarez, a Nobel laureate
physicist at the University of
California. His team has
been pondering mysterious
deposits of a rare element,
iridium, at sites in Denmark,
Italy and Spain.

The iridium was laid down
in limestone at the exact
time ef the dinosaurs’
demise. and the indium
concentration was 160 times

Mammoth
herd
discovered

MOSCOW (UPI) - A herd of

Mammoths thai lived (7
ceniuries ago has been found
buried deep beneath a riven
bank in Bvelorussia. the Tass
News agency has reported

Vhe dispatch from Minsk
did not say how many ot the
tusked animals were found
bumed in a crevice under os
64-10o0t layer of dotomite on
the banks of the Dyvina
River, near Vitebsk

Attention |
North Shore
Residents:

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what might have been ex-
pected.

Iridium is a_ thousand
times more abundant in
meteorites than in the earth’s
crust, a fact that suggests the
deposits came from = an
extraterrestial source.

Alvarez proposed that
Earth was struck by an
asteroid six miles in
diameter that blasted a

crater 100 miles wide with .

the force of 100 million
hydrogen bombs.

Such an explosion would
have thrown an enormous

quantity of dust into the
Stratosphere where, ac-
cording to the hypothesis, it
remained for several years
casting Earth into semi-
darkness.

Lack of sunlight would
have killed plankton in the
ocean and plants on land,
thus depriving fish and
animals of food. Russell
concluded from evidence in
fossils that 75 per cent of all
living species, including the
dinosaurs, the most in-
telligent creatures of the
time, became extinct.

IZMIR, TURKEY: Since Sunday this town has been a virtual battleground, with
security forces clashing with workers led by ieft-wing militants. Here a plainclothes
policeman takes cover behind a militant captured minutes earlier. (UPI wirephoto)

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