Talk:Alvarez hypothesis
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[edit] Impact effect
This came up in discussions at Katie. I have to hand a copy of The Great Extinction; What Killed the Dinosaurs and Devastated the Earth, by Michael Allaby and James Lovelock. (see ISBN 038518011X) which goes into some detail about the Alvarez hypothesis on the effect of a large lump hitting the Earth. On impact with the sea, rock and the sea where they met would be dissociated into atoms, stripped of electrons to form an extremely hot plasma cloud, a very dense gas which would then rise, not through convection but because there was nowhere else to go, forming a fireball carrying between 6,000 and 60,000 billion tonnes of matter into the atmosphere at about escape velocity so that some could have gone into orbit. The hot, dense, plasma would have been almost disc shaped, rising extremely quickly as a very wide barrel of fire. That, of course, is just the start. It's an ancient source, from the days before macs roamed the earth, but on that basis the image at Katie seems pretty reasonable. The info's not here, let me know if you'd like to add to it to expand the article ... dave souza, talk 09:09, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
