Re: The K-T boundary in Nanxiong

["James R. Cunningham" <jrccea@bellsouth.net>]

Yep, it could.  I once did some extremely rough calculations that indicate you
could very approximately match the average megatonnage-per-area if you were to
take 7 of the largest hydrogen bombs the Soviets ever built (their biggest ones
were bigger than the biggest US bombs), strap them together into a cluster, and
then place duplicate copies of those clusters every 4.5 to 5 miles apart, all
over the surface of the earth and oceans, you would roughly match the average.
Thank goodness, the actual energy distribution was uneven, because I don't think
anything much would have survived a uniform distribution of that magnitude,
which would be equivalent to having 28 of these individual bombs go off within
2.5 miles of you, no matter where on the planet you were located.  That aside,
even the Atlantic mudslide expended an enormous amount of energy, and you can
imagine what the consequent turbidity did to local life forms (not to mention
many of the bottom dwellers west of the mid-Atlantic ridge probably didn't
appreciate being buried under 3 to 50 feet of mud.

Graydon wrote:

> > Don't you mean what range of teratonnage?
>
> It could be done as megatonnage-per-area, like the atmospheric thermal
> bloom commetary impact scenarios that got tossed around before Chixiculb
> got found (and which sometimes get included as part of the 'lots of
> stuff re-enters' scenarios.)