Contents Updated: Monday, September 13, 1999
If the anthroposaurs were as territorial as mankind then we could expect them to engage in conflict and, if their society became technical then the conflicts could have been huge, just as mankind's World Wars were—about 20 million people died in the first World War and about 55 million people in the second. The severity of wars have grown exponentially like population and we can expect several hundred million deaths as a very minimum if another world war started.
Many of the symptoms of our own time were displayed at the end of the Cretaceous. What of nuclear war? Any advanced society worth its salt will have discovered the equivalence of matter and energy. Did the anthroposaurs? John Noble Wilford tells us that uranium and dinosaurs are often found together. The bones soak up and concentrate the uranium in the mineralization process. Perhaps there are less prosaic reasons for this association.
Evidence of prehistoric nuclear combustion has been found by French scientists in Gabon, West Africa. Uranium consists of different isotopes, mainly Uranium-235 and Uranium-238, which are normally found in constant ratios in any uranium deposits. Only U-235 is suitable for atomic reactors, and it is just this isotope that the ore lacks. It is depleted in U-235 just as if the reactive isotope had been extracted leaving the waste Uranium 238 and some other rare elements. The scientists' explained that the isotope had leached out and spontaneously reacted in a natural atomic pile. But it could equally have been deliberately extracted.
The deposits are far older than the Cretaceous but neither do we extract valuable minerals from deposits that are being laid down today. The anthroposaurs were tapping rocks laid down long before they appeared on the scene.
What would our waste ponds at atomic weapon factories and nuclear power stations look like in 65 million years? What would the remains of the Chernobyl atomic reactor look like when the passage of time has eroded away the concrete and the radioactive residue has permeated the surrounding clay? Perhaps in these instances too there might be some spontaneous reactions, chemical and physical which the geologists of 65 million AD will believe have occurred naturally.
The nuclear power industry depends upon nuclear fission which generates hundreds of types of highly radioactive elements as waste materials. Some are intensely radioactive but have short half lives and become depleted if stored for a few years. Many others are radioactive for anything from thousands to millions of years. The USA has millions of gallons of high level waste, that will be radioactive for millions of years. Some of it was stored at West Valley in storage tanks that were not expected to last for more than 35 years!
High level waste from the Manhattan Project, the development of the wartime atom bomb, was dumped on to land surrounding the town of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and apparently forgotten. Then local citizens became alarmed as many became afflicted with and died of a variety of cancers. Tests showed soil on the playing field of the local high school had radiation readings 700 times the background level.
Besides high level waste there are also large amounts of low level waste that is not so intensely radioactive though some of it may also be active for long periods. In fact there is evidence that nuclear plant operators have diluted high level waste until it could be falsely described as low level waste. Low level waste surprisingly often accidentally seeps into the ground or streams. Thus it is conveniently disposed of. If the secret got out, the experts will reassure us it is only low level waste.
By the year 2000 AD there will be 2000 tons of plutonium stockpiled and 160 tons a year being produced, all in civilian reactor programs. Twenty pounds is enough to make an atomic bomb. Criminals or fanatics who got hold of this small amount of plutonium could make a bomb. It would not have to be well designed or efficient. Even a nuclear damp squib could cause horrific damage especially in a populated area. It would spread so much radioactive contamination that it could be worse than an atomic blast.
Only 45 years after the first nuclear reaction, mankind has some 600 nuclear power plants in operation. Rosalie Bertell, a cancer specialist, calculates that 13 million people in the world have died of fallout since the War. That does not include the effects of Chernobyl. If there were a nuclear war, a hit on a nuclear power station would produce a very dirty blast indeed. All the fission products of the nuclear reactors' cores would be vaporized and sent high into the atmosphere to cause fallout never before seen by mankind. Long-lived radioisotopes would pollute the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Each power plant destroyed in this way would be equivalent to an extra 25 megatons of nuclear bombs in killing potential, though the damage would be spread in time.
Scientists have noticed at nuclear test sites in sandy areas that one effect of the atomic blast is to fuse the sand into a green glass. Yet glass of this type is found throughout the globe in certain geological strata. Steiger asks, could it be possible that these sites provide evidence of a prehistoric nuclear war? Droplets of molten glass are found in the K-T boundary layer. One might wonder whether any of the late Cretaceous sediments contain unusual amounts of long-lived nuclear isotopes or their decay products.
Advocates of the asteroid theory point to stress lines in pieces of quartz, stress lines that have only been noted in quartz in four different circumstances, one being in the residues at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The other three instances are in the laboratory produced by tests, in known meteorite craters, and on the Nevada nuclear test site. The expert's argument goes:
We have found stressed quartz; we know it occurs where meteorites have fallen; therefore a meteorite fell. (Oh, the same effects can be made artificially in the laboratory or by nuclear bomb blasts, but we all know those are irrelevant in this context.)
Though pollution can damage forests much worse damage would occur from nuclear attack and fallout. Pine trees protect themselves against damage by exuding a resin which subsequently hardens and becomes amber. An explanation of the large amounts of amber found in some parts of the world could be that radiation or pollution severely damaged or stressed pine forests leaving the trees exuding their natural defensive substance in large quantities.
After the disaster at Chernobyl, scientists studying the effects of fallout on coniferous forests found that the trees quickly absorbed dangerous radioactive cesium and incorporated it into their wood. But not by the root system—cesium sinks only slowly into the soil and it would take 25 years or more for it to begin to be taken up this way—pine needles directly absorbed the radioactive elements. Thus radioactive cesium is absorbed rapidly through pine needles and more slowly through roots subjecting the trees to severe stress for a long period but without necessarily killing them. When the trees eventually did die long lived isotopes would return to the soil to continue their damage in succeeding generations. Amber is variously dated. Baltic amber is usually dated in the Oligocene epoch of about 30 million years ago but the Eocene epoch of 55 million years ago is also given. Valchovite, the amber from Czechoslovakia, is dated to the late Cretaceous period, the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Radioactive emissions preserve. A dinosaur mummy hadrosaur discovered by Charles Sternberg died 65 million years ago, lying on its back apparently unharmed and with no signs of predators or scavengers having touched it. It is odd that it did not decay or get eaten. Supposedly it dried out in the sun, got swiftly washed downstream and got covered with fine mud so quickly that its dried skin had no time to rehydrate and decay. Dinosaur mummies are rare, but when found they are usually late Cretaceous hadrosaurs. Why should they have died so perfectly and been preserved? Because they died of gamma radiation and neutrons which preserved them as surely as it would preserve strawberries in a plastic bag?
Failure of photosynthesis is another mechanism of dinosaur extinctions. Dust from the crashing asteroid or erupting volcanoes cut off the light and heat of the sun, preventing plants from making sugars and cellulose from carbon dioxide and water. Plants would die then animals would starve, and if the darkness continued for long enough whole species would become extinct. It could happen today. Some scientists wrote in 1984:
...clouds of fine particles would soon spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere, absorbing and scattering sunlight and thus darkening and cooling the earth's surface. Continental temperatures could fall rapidly—well below freezing for months, even in summertime... We have only recently become aware of how severe the cold and the dark might be... agriculture, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, could be severely damaged for a year or more, causing widespread famine... humans would die from freezing, starvation, disease, and the effects of radiation... the extinction of many plant and animal species can be expected, and in extreme cases, the extinction of most non-oceanic species might occur...
They were warning the Pope of the dangers, not of volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts, but of a nuclear winter following a nuclear war.
They concluded:
Nuclear war could thus carry in its wake a destruction of life unparalleled at any time during the tenure of humans on earth, and might therefore imperil the future of humanity.
Quite. And did the anthroposaurs actually do this 65 million years ago to cause the Cretaceous mass extinction of species? If a nuclear war could cause extinctions now, why shouldn't a nuclear war among anthroposaurs have done the same then?
Luis Alverez himself in 1982 drew the parallels between the asteroid collision and a nuclear war. A major exchange of bombs on the scale we have them at present could release the same energy as the fall of a 1000 yard wide asteroid. The asteroid would concentrate all the impact in one spot and be capable of blowing chunks of terrestrial matter high into the atmosphere, even out into space. A nuclear exchange would not put as much matter into the high stratosphere, but what did go up would be more evenly distributed geographically, and might also be spread out over a period of time.
Chicago University scientists found deposits of carbon distributed world wide in the iridium layers. Apparently there had been extensive and intense fires. The fires would have darkened the skies with dense smoke and poisoned the air with incompletely burnt carbon forming the deadly poisonous gas carbon monoxide. Couldn't atomic warfare have ignited these fires? Was there a nuclear winter?
A sudden cooling certainly did occur. The coal layer at the end of the Cretaceous Period marks a distinct change in climate. In the more recent rocks above it are cool climate plants like the giant sequioa; in the older rocks below it are subtropical plants like ferns and cycads. Is this layer of coal a fossil of the nuclear winter?
In 1962-63 southern England experienced its coldest winter since 1740. The cause was a peculiar meandering of the stratospheric jetstream, a fierce continuous blast of wind which influences weather patterns even though it is itself above the weather zone. Over Britain the jetstream pushed arctic air further south.
1962 marked the culmination, prior to the implementation of the nuclear atmospheric test ban treaty, of an enormous escalation of atmospheric testing. About 20 megatons were tested in 1958, but in both 1961 and 1962 the tonnage tested was about 200 megatons. K.Y.Kondratyev, the former USSR's leading atmospheric scientist says that the tests severely disturbed thermal radiation in the upper atmosphere leading to four per cent less sunlight reaching the surface.
The Russians were particularly concerned because one result was that their grain harvest in 1963 was disastrous. The attenuation of the sunlight was the result of the production of brown nitrogen oxides in the nuclear fireballs. And that was only with 200 megatons exploded over deserts or oceans such that dust and smoke were not created. A nuclear winter is not in the realms of fantasy. Smoke and dust do not have to be sent into the stratosphere to prevent the sun's rays from reaching the surface—nitrogen oxides do the job quite well, though any serious nuclear conflagration will provide smoke and dust aplenty as well as brown fumes.
Another reason offered for the downfall of our dinosaurian predecessors is radiation from space. We do not need supernovas or any such explanations for the danger that we face today from radiation from space. Few people will be unaware of the hole in the ozone layer observed over the Antarctic. More recently one has been noted in the Arctic and it is getting bigger. The March 1985 edition of the UN Environment Program News stated that ozone depletion could seriously affect many life forms. Ozone blocks the entry of high energy UV radiation to the earth's surface. UV causes blindness and skin cancer in humans.
The agents destroying the ozone layer are CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons. We release CFCs into the air faster than nature degrades them. They react with UV radiation in the stratosphere to give free radicals which then trigger a chain reaction breaking ozone into ordinary oxygen which has no protective value against UV. Each 2.5 per cent rise in CFC concentration causes an extra million skin cancers. The World Wide Fund for nature claims that the extra UV reaching the earth's surface is killing phytoplankton, the primary food source of the oceans.
The CFCs are also particularly powerful greenhouse gases, 1000 times more effective than carbon dioxide. Dr Robert Watson maintains that the ozone layer will continue to reduce for the next fifty years whatever we do because of the chlorine already released. International Conferences calling for cuts in production of CFCs can apparently achieve nothing in our lifetime. We can only take measures that might benefit our children! Burning tropical forests contributes also.
The amount of smoke produced from the fires in the Amazon region, according to Dr Alberto Setzer of Brazil's space research institute, is equivalent to a hundred volcanoes erupting. Professor Paul Crutzens, Head of the Max Planck Institute at Mainz and one of the world's leading experts on the ozone layer, says these fires are among the main causes of ozone destruction. The peak of Amazon burning is in August. It takes about ten days for the smoke to penetrate the stratosphere and travel south. The peak of Antarctic ozone erosion occurs from September to November. Maybe the soot layer in the K-T boundary zone reported from New Zealand and elsewhere indicates that the anthroposaurs destroyed their ozone layer and left themselves exposed to deadly UV radiation. Again one feels justified in asking whether today's events have been experienced before by the earth.
I have tried to convince you that an intelligent dinosaur could have destroyed much of the life on earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Many facts support the hypothesis. Moreover we can see the intelligent species with which we are familiar—ourselves—creating conditions that seem to mirror those that were so destructive then.
Needless to say, experts often find it hard to see.