A Meteorite With an Organic Signature?

ScienceDaily has an excellent story on the Tagish Lake Meteorite, known as a carbonaceous chondrite. It seems that the great rock from the sky has chemicals that are similar to the proposed prebiotic organic material on earth, lending more credence to the idea that early life may have had an extraterrestrial impetus. The story notes:

If--as many have speculated--the organic material in meteorites had a role to play in the origin of life on Earth, the attraction of the common-source hypothesis is that the same organic material would have been delivered to all bodies in the Solar System. If the common source was the interstellar medium, then similar material would also be delivered to any forming planetary system.

The research team -- led by Christopher Herd of the University of Alberta, Canada, and including Carnegie's Conel Alexander, Larry Nittler, Frank Gyngard, George Cody, Marilyn Fogel, and Yoko Kebukawa -- studied four meteorite specimens from the shower of stones, produced by the breakup of a meteoroid as it entered the atmosphere, that fell on Tagish Lake in northern Canada in January 2000. The samples are considered very pristine, because they fell on a frozen lake, were collected without hand contact within a few days of landing and have remained frozen ever since.

According to the story, If these meteorites were part of a larger group of meteors or one larger body, it may be that they were part of the original body that formed the solar system. Sort of takes the “how could life on earth happen by pure chance” argument and turns it on its ear.

Cretaceous Extinction: The Smoking Gun?

Canwest is reporting on research by Sankar Chatterjee, of Texas Tech University, who claims to have found the impact crater that led to the dinosaur extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. They write:

The area is about 500 kilometres in diameter and encircles a peak about five kilometres high known as the Bombay High. It is also a spot mined extensively for oil and gas by companies that tend to keep their geological data secret, which has delayed the ability of researchers to do any in-depth research of the suspected crater.

A bit later, they write:

Chatterjee said the crater is likely the largest on the planet and was caused by an object about 40 kilometres in diameter. The energy released on impact would dwarf the detonation of all nuclear weapons on Earth combined, he said. The impact caused what's known as the "KT Extinction Event," a combination of blast effects that killed off 70 per cent of life on the planet 65 million years ago. Other researchers say more study is needed.

This will rattle some cages. Common consensus is that the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan peninsula is the impact point for the KT extinction event. Others still argue that the dinosaurs were in steep decline even before either of these impacts took place.

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