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the Facts & Faith, Third Quarter
1997 Issue (Vol. 11, No. 3)by Dr. Hugh Ross
Popular knowledge of the asteroid collision 65 million years ago in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, has greatly increased in recent years perhaps because interest in dinosaurs is so universal and because the evidence has progressed from strong to undeniable.1 One question has lingered, however: Was the asteroid collision more likely responsible for most of the Cretaceous Tertiary (C-T) extinctions or for all of them?
A recent discovery tips the scale toward all. Core drills into marine deposits studied by a team of American paleoceanographers show that such microorganisms as foraminifera, nannoplankton, and dinoflagellates flourished until deposition of the debris layer caused by that collision; then suddenly, they vanished.2 That asteroid packed a powerful punch.
How wide is that debris layer? About 5,000 years wide. And what do we se in the layer above it? Life, life, and more life--new species marking the beginning of the Tertiary period.2, 3 The search for answers about the extinction has led to the most important speciation discovery to date.
Consider our designation of the Cambrian speciation. We refer to it as an "explosion," a sudden burst of new life forms. This "sudden" burst occurred in a span that measures about 5 million years (it may be much briefer, but 5 million represents the current limit of our measuring capability for that era.) By comparison, this 5,000 years burst represents a geologic eye blink.
By anyone's estimation, mindless natural processes cannot be responsible for the appearance of so many new and different species in this miniscule time frame. If we can rule out any imaginable natural explanation, good science require that we leave the door open to a supernatural explanation.
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1997 Issue (Vol. 11, No. 3)