May 20, 2004

» Did a 'Verneshot' kill the dinosaurs?

The name Verneshot comes from Jules Verne's book "From the Earth to the Moon" in which a huge cannon shoots astronauts into space.

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The blast would trigger a magnitude 11 earthquake, bigger than any quake ever recorded.

But this would be just a prelude to the main event.

Immediately after the explosion, pressure would plummet in the pipe that carried the gases, causing it to cave in from the bottom upwards.

The collapse would travel up at hypersonic speed, erupting with unimaginable force at the surface and hurling as much as 20 gigatonnes of rock into the stratosphere.

The energy released would be equivalent to 120 billion tonnes of TNT, or seven million of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

Debris would rain down from the sky, and dust would blot out the sun to cause the same kind of climate changing effects as an impact from space.

A large piece of rock from a Verneshot blast landing on the Earth would produce a crater in the same way as an asteroid or comet.

An object ejected from the Deccan Traps could explain why the Chicxulub crater, linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is so lopsided.