The Day the Dinosaurs Died

[Jules]

I will have to find the more recent Final Day doc then

The only full videos I've found are on sites like Dailymotion. But there's a lot of ads to deal with. I'm hoping BBC will run the doc in the US and elsewhere. My SO just stumbled on the New Yorker article and that sent me on finding more. It's surprising how hard it is to find information on DePalma and Tanis.

 

[billy backstay]

The only full videos I've found are on sites like Dailymotion. But there's a lot of ads to deal with. I'm hoping BBC will run the doc in the US and elsewhere. My SO just stumbled on the New Yorker article and that sent me on finding more. It's surprising how hard it is to find information on DePalma and Tanis.

I think some of these scientists are more involved with their work than to publicize it, sadly to our deficit.

 

[Jules]

Watched this story on NOVA last night

Just ran across an article on WTTW, Chicago's PBS station, that featured a clip from their show with DePalma. Right after that they were airing a NOVA episode, featuring DePalma, called “Dinosaur Apocalypse” so maybe that's what you saw. Guess what I am doing next?

 

[Virgulino Ferreira]

Also watched a great NOVA about the Peruvian Nazca civizilation prior to the Aztecs who made the crop circles and giant petroglyphs. Fascinating stuff, but it baffles me how they can come to their conlusions based on the slim to none evidence!

This wonderful BBC documentary may be of interest to you:









The presenter, Jago Cooper, is a respected archaeologist specializing in the Americas. He has other documentaries on Youtube, all very good.

 

[Jules]

@billy backstay : Looks like the doc aired on May 11 but isn't available through On Demand here. I have NOVA on record for all new episodes but just changed it to new and repeat. Fingers crossed it will replay here.

 

[Goodvibes]

Until the theory that an asteroid caused a global disaster, there was a general belief that earth's atmosphere protected us from such a thing. After the scientific community started accepting the findings of Alverez, et al, there was a call to protect the planet from another such strike. So some bright minds did set about trying to save the planet.

Whether we can is questionable but if we can't stop another such disaster, things like global warming, pollution, stripping the planet's resources, etc will all seem trivial.

We have been studying impact craters for hundreds of years (if not longer), so I have no idea where the belief that the atmosphere will protect us came from.

As far as relative risk goes, the one in a billion (made that up) chance that we will be hit by a big one any time soon seems pretty acceptable compared with the certainty of severe climate change will disrupt (is disrupting) life as we know it on this planet in our lifetimes. Not trivial where I live, it's life threatening now.

EDIT: But it appears that subjects like this are a distraction from reality, convenient for oil companies, and from your post, it's working.

 

[veni vidi vici]

Hmmm… certainly seems it would have knocked earth out of its orbit
Interesting bedtime story

 

[Jules]

One of the findings they have made is many creatures were found in the vertical position. From some of the descriptions of what happened that day, it sounds like a tsunami-like wave came in and laid down a thick deposit of mud and debris, entombing whatever was there that day. Sort of like what happened at Pompeii.

The problem I see with that hypothesis is if it was a liquid wave that came in, it would have bowled everything over. But what if the seismic waves from the impact caused liquefaction to occur? That would have caused the creatures and the tektites they found so beautifully preserved to quickly submerge in the quicksand-like conditions.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Hee hee. "Stinky monkey."

 

[Autonomous]

Yellowstone is gonna have its say, again.

 

[Jules]

Still hanging onto the volcano theory after all those findings?

 

[Autonomous]

Whoosh! My quip went right over your head.

Care to tell me how you arrived at your "still hanging onto" assumption?
Pre judge much?
Hmmm?

 

[Virgulino Ferreira]

This is fun, and scary. Check the "about" for the science behind it.

Asteroid Launcher

Make your own asteroid and launch it at Earth

neal.fun

 

[Virgulino Ferreira]

https://www.science.org/content/art...cused-faking-data-dino-killing-asteroid-paper

Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper
6 Dec 2022

Scientist Robert DePalma who oversees famed extinction-day site denies claims he made up data to scoop a former collaborator

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

eep.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

https://www.science.org/content/art...cused-faking-data-dino-killing-asteroid-paper

Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper
6 Dec 2022

Scientist Robert DePalma who oversees famed extinction-day site denies claims he made up data to scoop a former collaborator

Hmm...

...
In a 6 January letter to the journal editor handling his manuscript, which he forwarded to Science, DePalma acknowledged that the line graphs in his paper were plotted by hand instead of with graphing software, as is the norm in the field. He says he did so because the isotopic data had been supplied as a “non-digital data set” by a collaborator, archaeologist Curtis McKinney of Miami Dade College, who died in 2017. DePalma also acknowledged that the “manual transcription process” resulted in some “regrettable” instances in which data points drifted from the correct values, but “none of these examples changed the overall geometry of the plotted lines or affected their interpretation.” McKinney’s “non-digital data set,” he says, “is viable for research work and remains within normal tolerances for usage.”

Miami Dade does not have an operational mass spectrometer, suggesting McKinney would have had to perform the isotope analyses underlying the paper at another facility. But McKinney’s former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. “I don’t believe that Curtis himself went to another lab, he was ill for many years,” Sacasa says.

Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinney’s data. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. These tables are not the same as raw data produced by the mass spectrometer named in the paper’s methods section, but DePalma noted the data’s credibility had been verified by two outside researchers, paleontologist Neil Landman at the American Museum of Natural History and geochemist Kirk Cochran at Stony Brook University.

Both Landman and Cochran confirmed to Science they had reviewed the data supplied by DePalma in January, apparently following Scientific Reports’s request for additional clarification on the issues raised by During and Ahlberg immediately after the paper’s publication. Cochran says the format of the isotopic data does not appear unusual. “‘Raw machine data’ are seldom supplied to end users (myself included) who contract for isotope analyses from a lab that does them.”

...

I would be kind of surprised if Miami Dade Community College had even a non-operational mass spectrometer. It's the 13th grade. Or was when I lived there, which was a disturbingly long time ago now that I think about it.

 

[BeSafe]

Hmm...



I would be kind of surprised if Miami Dade Community College had even a non-operational mass spectrometer. It's the 13th grade. Or was when I lived there, which was a disturbingly long time ago now that I think about it.

I was sort of shocked that they DON'T. I find that 'Miami Dade has no MS' to be pretty unlikely - even for 13th grade. I have two MS (and probably one in storage that but I think we scrapped it). They're pretty cheap now, as such tools go. Toward the question at hand, however, it takes good standards and a fair bit of skill to get reliable analysis of the type their trying to discern. That's not a barrier though - just a complication.

My fav T-rex

 

[billsreef]

There are 3 chemistry labs in my building with mass specs. They are typically set up to look for fairly specific things. One of these labs is a Stable Isotope lab that does primarily contract work for other labs within the university as well as for outside contract work. So not surprising that MDC wouldn't have a stable Isotope facility. Be curious who was used, UM and ours would be the local ones. Results are usually sent as an excel file.

 

[Jules]

https://www.science.org/content/art...cused-faking-data-dino-killing-asteroid-paper

Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper
6 Dec 2022

Scientist Robert DePalma who oversees famed extinction-day site denies claims he made up data to scoop a former collaborator

I don't know how scientists get any real work done when you have to publish papers every other scientist is just chomping at the bit to discredit.

At the beginning of DePalma's presentation to NASA scientists, the lady scientist tells the other scientists that DePalma is working toward his doctorate degree. Then she turns to DePalma to confirm that. I found myself wondering if he said, "No," would they have all left.