Anyone have any thoughts on the Indian Meteor Theory? I am d...

Anyone have any thoughts on the Indian Meteor Theory?
I am dubious due the the improbability of two such bodies hitting the earth in such a short period of time...

Anything is Possible! There are so many theories out there that it starts to get confusing. It is simple: something killed the dinosaurs. Whatever caused it really is not that important anyway, definitely not worth the "money" that is spent researching it. Finding fossils and trying to imagine what happened ,on the other hand, is very fun and doesn't cost very much. Debating what happened is extremely fun as long as all parties understand "Nobody Really Knows For Sure" except the earth. I feel as others that the earth is a living entity, very much alive. It was around here at that time and I think it may remember. Although at her age she may have a little bit of alzheimers or may just want to forget a few things.

Everyone has to remember that the earth is forever evolving. We have proof of the ice age and other natural phenomena that have shaped our earth. Could global warming be a part of that or did man create it? We may be our own demise and dinosaurs could evolve from present day creatures. Without us encroaching on every square mile of the earth they would be the new rulers of earth allowing them to grow larger as thier terrain increases. Will the continents drift back together? Will creatures evolve beyond what we know now? What is that jelly in spam? But no I`m not buying the Indian meteor theory either.

I may not know what caused the dinosaur extinction, but I do know what that jelly in spam tastes good

with all the natural problems with a new plant, the dinosaurs had it pretty rough. [ earth quakes,volcano's,land masses separating,quick sand,tar pits just to name a few. We may never find out in our life time what killed the dinosaurs.ith all the natural problems with a new plant, the dinosaurs had it pretty rough. [ earth quakes,volcano's,land masses separating,quick sand,tar pits just to name a few. We may never find out in our life time what killed the dinosaurs.
I think that jelly in the spam is as mysterious as the fall of the dinosaur era.

has it not been proven through fact that something instantly disintergrated life 65 million yrs ago' is it not fact that there have been 5 mass destintions ? remember im just a rockhound who reads scientific conclusions feel free 2 correct anything that comes out of my amatuer mouth.

is it not fact that the earth has already gone through multiple heat induced cycles and is just doing whats been done before ?

Fact is that so many things in science aren`t fact. There are agreements and disagreements depending on if the theory is based on flawed reasoning. Have innocent men ever gone to prison because the prosecutor told a better story than a public defender? Can police and an entire jury be wrong?

It is true that these heat induced cycles are in history. They all have a cause from solar cycles to massive forest fires to normal warming cycles of the earth. Our human actions are only accelerating the timeline of this process and possibly amplifying solar cycles. If we didn't have the industrial revolution we would be seeing this irratic weather behavior maybe in a thousand years or so. We cannot change things for the short term but can keep it from turning into an extinction event, meaning us, in the future. I don't have an answer as to how to do this so will just watch and snicker as snow misses us and visits the southern states. So the cold has finally adopted a migratory pattern that makes our life here in Yooperville better. Isn't global warming nice Everything is a matter of perspective. The snow and cold will fill the water reservours that the south requires so alls not bad.

The hypothesis that you have referred to as the "Indian Meteor Theory" has been under long-term development (~20 years or more) by Dr. Sankar Chatterjee at Texas Tech University. It suggests that the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact was actually a double impact. One source I read indicated that Sankar's hypothesis denied the Chicxulub site as the target, but I haven't been able to substantiate that denial. I don't know all the details of Dr. Chatterjee's idea, but let me make a few points about the evidence for multiple impacts.

First, look into the events of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. On its first pass by Jupiter, this large comet broke apart (calved) into 21 separate, large fragments that traveled in a line (rather like a string of pearls) for another long orbit. Then they returned to Jupiter, and, over three days in 1994, every one of them struck the surface of the gas giant. One location was struck three times, each time one Jovian day apart. The fireballs from these events were so large, the explosions peeked over the back side of the planet and gave us a ringside seat to the magnitude of such a collision. The destruction was so profound it left Earth-sized scorch marks on the upper atmosphere of the supergiant. One comet, 21 impacts. And S-L 9 wasn't much bigger than the rock that hit Earth 65.5 MYA. Multiple impacts are not only plausible, we've witnessed them occur.

Second, there are several interesting features about the region in western India that Dr. Chatterjee is interested in. The Deccan Traps is a massive field of volcanic material erupted from a supervolcano over a period of 30000 years, about the same time postulated for the asteroid impact. The output of this volcanic complex is some half million cubic kilometers of flood basalts, a scale of eruption that has not occurred in several million years and would be a globe-changing event no matter what the cause. Structures within these flood basalts suggested initially to Dr. Chatterjee that these were an "antipodal response" to the Chicxulub impact--essentially the shockwaves of the impact radiated around the crust to converge on the antipodal point of the planet and disrupt the crust there. Now, evidently, he has some thoughts on the site as a second impact.

There are a few details I hope will be more thoroughly addressed as the hypothesis develops. Lava cools at the surface relatively rapidly and therefore usually provides a good substrate for radiometric analysis; it surprises me that we have no more rigorously constrained dates for the eruptive event (60-68 MYA is very general). Impact debris scatters in wide aprons around the crater and typically include iridium-enriched minerals, shocked quartz grains, and tsunami deposits, and I would interested to find some of these around the Indian Ocean perimeter. The crater itself presumably punched a hole through the crust into the mantle; because of continental drift, India is no longer where it was then, but the mantle underneath may have been perturbed enough to retain a magnetic or density anomaly (much like the one under the Chicxulub crater) which could be measured. Dr. Chatterjee has a history of producing interesting ideas; as with those before this one, I'll be interested to see further research.