Armageddon - Extinction Events

"These rocks have been through a lot, geologically speaking, and a lot of times they don't preserve the (extinction) boundary very well," says Luann Becker, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Indeed, there are few 250 million-year-old rocks left on Earth. Most have been recycled by our planet's tectonic activity.

Undaunted, Becker led a NASA-funded science team to sites in Hungary, Japan and China where such rocks still exist and have been exposed. There they found telltale signs of a collision between our planet and an asteroid 6 to 12 km across - in other words, as big or bigger than Mt. Everest.

Many paleontologists have been skeptical of the theory that an asteroid caused the extinction. Early studies of the fossil record suggested that the die-out happened gradually over millions of years - not suddenly like an impact event. But as their methods for dating the disappearance of species has improved, estimates of its duration have shrunk from millions of years to between 8,000 and 100,000 years. That's a blink of the eye in geological terms.

"I think paleontologists are now coming full circle and leading the way, saying that the extinction was extremely abrupt," Becker notes. "Life vanished quickly on the scale of geologic time, and it takes something catastrophic to do that."

Image courtesy Luann Becker. The carbon atoms in a fullerene molecule are arranged in a spherical pattern similar to a geodesic dome. (Geodesic domes were invented by Buckminster Fuller, hence the name of the molecules.) This shape allows the fullerenes to trap gases inside.

Such evidence is merely circumstantial - it doesn't actually prove anything. Becker's evidence, however, is more direct and persuasive:

Deep inside Permian-Triassic rocks, Becker's team found soccer ball-shaped molecules called "fullerenes" (or "buckyballs") with traces of helium and argon gas trapped inside. The fullerenes held an unusual number of ³He and ³⁶Ar atoms - isotopes that are more common in space than on Earth. Something, like a comet or an asteroid, must have brought the fullerenes to our planet.