Disturbance Ecology from Nearby Supernovae

• Main Authors: D. H. Hartmann, K. Kretschmer, R. Diehl
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Alvarez; Grim; Kali; Myriad Islands; Pacific
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.317.6154; http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0205110v1.pdf

“Kali 2 entered the atmosphere just before sunrise, a hundred kilometers above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad islands. But few humans; not many were asleep this night of nights, except those who had sought the oblivion of drugs ” [11]. This grim description of an asteroid impact by Arthur C. Clarke was inspired by the famous paper “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction ” by Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter Alvarez [1]. That great extinction episodes in geological history are tightly connected to asteroid/comet impacts is now firmly established [5][2]. Whether impact events are (quasi)periodic or random is not yet clear, and it is also not yet established if some external agent (e.g., a hypothetical Nemesis companion star of the Sun or modulated Oort cloud pertubations via solar oscillations in the Galactic disk; [33][36]) is required to explain the extinction record. While the idea of repeated blows by some “Hammer of God ” has found widespread acceptance, a paradigm shift is underway with regards to the way we think about such catastrophes. Was the extinction of the dinosaurs a bad day in our history? From the point of view of the dinosaurs it sure counts as a bad day, but from our