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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Are the causes of other mass extinctions known? I can imagine comet impacts can be hard to trace over billions of years. Especially when it's not just a single big one, but a period of increased impacts.

Also, I believe the dinosaur extinction was not just a comet impact, but a combination of an impact and a period of increased volcanic activity. Could the volcanic activity be triggered by comets?

I think the jury is still out, but it's an interesting field of study across many different fields (astronomy, biology, geology and probably more), and it has obvious implications for humanity's future on Earth, in space, and the chances of finding other life out there.

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I live not too far from the Danish location Stevn Klint, a chalk cliff formation where the Alvarez'es found one very neat exhibit for their case. Utterly fascinating: You can climb to the foot of the cliffs, and there, unmistakable and obvious, is the dark, horizontal line in the massive wall of white - you can see it, you can touch it, and you can ponder the very different nature of fossil below and above the line.

There is a local museum rigth next to the cliffs. A few years ago, I spoke to the leader there, a woman with a ph.d. in history, who more or less supplied the final death blow to any lingering respect I might have held for any kind of humanities: Her only take on Walter and Louis Alvarez and their world famous work in her own backyard was how of course they were so arrogant, they had raised hostility among scientists and everybody else the world over.

Arrogant about what?

I took it to be a humanities view of being out of whack with concensus.

what's that to do with anything in the thread

> Could the volcanic activity be triggered by comets?

That's an interesting question. My completely unqualified opinion would be no, an comet couldn't trigger the massive and ongoing volcanic activity that a mass extinction requires. I'd like to hear from someone more informed though.

Could a big enough comet impact cause the Earth behave like a liquid and therefore a wave destabilize the crust and increase volcanic events?

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