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Chicxulub Structure: A Volcanic Sequence of Late Cretaceous Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Charles B. Officer
Charles B. Officer*
Affiliation:
Earth Sciences Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
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The present Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction debate started with findings by Alvarez et al. (1980) of enhanced levels of iridium at K/T sections in Italy, Denmark and New Zealand. They postulated that the iridium was extraterrestrial in origin and related to a 10 km diameter asteroid impact which would have produced a crater some 200 km in diameter. They further suggested that a giant dust cloud would have been injected into the stratosphere from the impact with a residence time of several years and that the resulting darkness would have suppressed photosynthesis with a consequent elimination of succeeding members in the biological food chain — ergo, a mass extinction event.

Type
Extinctions
Information
The Paleontological Society Special Publications , Volume 7: Dino Fest , 1994 , pp. 425 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Paleontological Society 

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