I recently asked Dr. Jacquelyn Gill (a scientist, educator & an advocate for science) for evidence that ruled out comet as an impactor for the Chicxulub crater, in Mexico, since she was very convinced that it was an asteroid that impacted the site.
Dr. Jacquelyn was kind enough to share with me not 1 or 2 but 10 links of evidence supporting her viewpoint, all of which are listed below (also see Twitter thread) :
1. The Chicxulub impactor: comet or asteroid ? (June 2021)
- Steve Desch, Alan Jackson, Jessica Noviello & Ariel Anbar
2. The breakup of a long-period comet is not a likely match to the Chicxulub impactor (June 2022)
- Steve Desch, Alan Jackson, Jessica Noviello & Ariel Anbar
3. Asteroid impact, not volcanism, caused theend-Cretaceous dinosaur extinction
4. The longtime global climatic consequences modeling of the Chicxulub asteroid impact event
5. The KPg boundary Chicxulub impact-extinction hypothesis: The winding road towards a solid theory
6. The Chicxulub impact and its environmental consequences
7. The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary
8. The identity of the Chicxulub impactor: KPg ejecta-encapsulated meteoric fragments
9. Globally distributed iridium layer preserved within the Chicxulub impact structure
10. The Science Of Why An Asteroid, Not A Comet, Wiped Out The Dinosaurs
- Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel
My rebuttal : There are several problems with the "evidence" presented. Links 3-9 are mostly irrelevant to the debate of asteroid or comet. Though link 10 is just a media report of the 2 science papers listed in link 1 & 2, it is written by an astrophysicist. So I will focus on addressing the major problems in the contents of link 1, 2 & 10. Also, Dr. Ethan Siegel's criticism (link 10) of Siraj and Loeb's paper (which suggested a comet impact) applies equally well to the papers of Steve Desch et al, mentioned in link 1 & 2. I love the irony here.
(work in progress. this is taking longer than anticipated. many distractions. till then read the extracts above. will be countering most of it)
Bottomline : There is not a scientist or institution on Earth that can look at (study) a crater & say whether it was created by an asteroid or a comet.
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