Had a great time last night at Northern Virginia Astronomy Club (NOVAC) giving my talk on "The Future of U.S. Manned Spaceflight". People are interested in their space program, believe me.
There was a great New York Times article published on Sunday that discusses the ongoing question of what killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It basically comes down to an impact event and/or a major volcanic event.
If you want to dig deeper into the controversy here are some links:
Gerta Keller, Professor of Geosciences
Volcanism, Impacts and Mass Extinctions
Deccan Traps Volcanism May Have Contributed
to Dinosaur Extinction, Sci-News.com, Dec. 15, 2014
Extraterrestrial impact in Yucatán, lava floods
& Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, Mark Richards
University of Berkeley (former dean at Berkeley)
(The talk starts about 8 minutes into the video)
Richards, M., W. Alvarez, S. Self, L. Karlstrom,
P. Renne, M. Manga, and C. Sprain, 2014, Possible
Triggering of the Largest Deccan Eruptions by
the Chicxulub Impact. Geophysical Research
Abstracts, vol. 16, number, EGU2014-3042
What IS certain is that the impact and volcanic events DID happen AND the dinosaurs DID die.
Only time and hard scientific evidence - if it can be found - will tell us the truth.
Sky Guy in VA