Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
Joining us on today's show is Dr. Tim Clary, geologist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Clary. Today we're going to be talking about something a little bit different than some of the other talks I've given for this program.
We're going to talk about the Chixalub Impact Site in Yucatan, Mexico. This is claimed by the secular world to be the smoking gun, or the site where the asteroid hit that wiped out the dinosaurs. And so almost every TV show you watch, every movie you watch now, will talk about this asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. And the Chixalub site in the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula is supposedly that site.
So I kind of like to think of this as a smoky gun or is it just smoke? And we're gonna look at the facts and the evidence and pro and con, and then we'll conclude with some sort of a summary that there really isn't that strong of evidence. Before an asteroid impact, at least a major impact that hit at the Yucatan. Yeah, but the secular world needs a story. They need to come up with some sort of a story because they reject the word of God.
The secular world rejects the history of the Bible, that there was a flood. They reject that God created everything to reproduce in their own image. And so, because they reject that, they need a story to explain why dinosaurs go extinct. Why are these great creatures out there? Huge animals over 100 feet long in some cases and Small ones, little ones, everything in between.
Why do they go extinct? Why did they just suddenly disappear in the rocks? Because they refused to believe there was a flood. We'll examine the second story of this great mystery of the dinosaur extinction. And one of the most popular ideas, of course, is this asteroid idea.
So we'll examine the story in some detail. The story goes that an asteroid about three to five miles wide hits this area of the Yucatan Peninsula at a time period back 66 million years ago. That's what you'll see in the books and the newspapers and the T V shows and the movies.
So a three to five mile wide asteroid strikes the Yucatan 66 million years ago and caused a global catastrophic event. One of the things that they claimed this would cause would be acid rain. nitric acid would be formed, sulphuric acid would be formed because they hid an area that had anhydride in it and anhydride has sulphur in it.
So they infer that all these different acids would go up in the atmosphere and come down as acid rain, which would affect the plants and possibly kill off the algae, even in the oceans. And they also infer that there were big wildfires that would be set up spontaneously from the heat from this impact.
So you have wildfires all over and they go around, they look for areas where they think they found charcoal evidence at this boundary. They inferred that there was dust and aerosols that would go up in the atmosphere for over a year or more, soot and ash, disrupting the food chain, similar to the acid rain. by just blocking out the sun. possibly even cooling the earth for a few years. just like we see major volcanoes do today.
The fourth thing they infer is there was it would be some sort of ozone destruction for several years as the chloride ions and bromide ions were shot up into the air. They were produced from a vaporized projectile that hit the Earth, this this asteroid that hit. They also inferred there would have been greenhouse gases, which would have done the opposite to the dust cloud, actually caused warming after the dust settled. A few years later, there would have been global warming going on because the water in the CO two projecting in the atmosphere from the impact of the asteroid hitting. Yeah, They even infer there might have been a 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in the global temperatures.
They also even assumed that there were tsunamis that went across the entire Gulf of Mexico where this hit. and send ejecta, as they call it, material out. for hundreds of miles in all directions across the Caribbean. And this ejecta went 180 miles inland even on the Gulf Coast. of the United States and up in Texas.
So they find evidence of tsunamis or at least conglomerates that they claim are tsunamis from the impact. And lastly, they say the recovery from this asteroid would have lasted for hundreds of years. The food chain would have been totally disrupted by all the acid rain, the dust, the aerosols, the wildflowers, greenhouse gases, the tsunamis. would have caused major destruction to the beginning of the food chain, the algae. The plants and those plants would have impacted the dinosaurs and the insects and everything about the plants that are needed to reproduce would have all been in total disarray, which ultimately would have caused the destruction of the dinosaurs.
Other secular paleontologists dispute this claim, however. They look at the rocks and they see there isn't a sudden extinction of dinosaurs. There are rocks in Montana, for example, show a gradual extinction. Dinosaurs become less and less in the rocks as they go upward towards the so-called KT or KPG boundary, which stands for Cretaceous, Tertiary, or Cretaceous Paleogene. Others have also shown that the impact, if there was an impact, that impact Breccia actually occurred prior to the end of the KT, maybe even 300,000 years in their mindset before that.
And they also claimed that the impact would have killed everything. All these effects that we discussed would have killed off every animal, every plant pretty much on Earth, and the Earth would have to start from scratch again.
So, their argument is: why did you just kill the dinosaurs? Why did you just kill off selected species? Of animals, selected reptiles, selected amphibians. It didn't impact all the mammals, but it impacted some. It didn't even impact the frogs.
Frogs living in these little ponds would have been very susceptible to acid rain coming down on them and killed them, but yet the frogs passed right through this boundary.
So the flood record of the fossils actually shows most of the diameters disappear at a certain level of that KT boundary. But when we come back, we'll talk about how the flood does explain this better than ever. We're going to take a short break. Dr. Clary will have more on this important topic in a moment.
The design of the human body inspires awe and fascination, and for good reason. It's made up of so many different parts and systems, all working together for a greater purpose. Check out our book, Guide to the Human Body, to discover astonishing facts about the construction of the cell, the mechanics of hands and feet, and the incredible abilities of the brain. Published by the Institute for Creation Research, Guide to the Human Body will answer questions you didn't even know you had. How do our eyes give us sight?
How does a baby take its first breath? What happens to the human body in outer space? Guide to the Human Body's full-color images and easy-to-read format shows our amazing design points to the ultimate designer, God. Order your copy from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. That's 800-628-7640 or visiting ICR.org.
Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Clary. We've been talking about the Chicxalub impact site in the Yucatan and the secular idea and there's speculation on all the effects this might have caused and why this would have caused the extinctions. But again, others argue that it would have caused even more extensive extinctions if it really happened.
What does the data show? Does the data really support? Does it support an impact or not? And primarily this so-called smoking gun, this site in the Yucatan, was identified on a semicircular gravity anomaly.
So gravity anomalies are formed by differences in density of the rock below. And so you can see a semi-circular shape on the maps when you look at the gravity across this area. but it doesn't show a complete circle. It shows a high in the center. and then kind of a surrounding low gravity, and then you go off to the to rumble rocks around the Yucatan.
But there's a few issues here that we find when you look at the data. When you examine all the wells that were drilled into this so-called crater, and you examine all the cores that they pulled out. I looked at the seismic, we see that there's a lack of iridium. One of the things that people started looking for this smoking gun was they found a layer of iridium that's enriched in iridium, which is a rare earth element, that presumably is found only in asteroids that hits the earth. but yet other scientists find iridium is produced commonly from volcanic eruptions.
So iridium itself doesn't prove there was an impact from an asteroid. Iridium could be from volcanic activity just as well. But they found iridium in an area of Italy called Gubbio, Italy. In 1980, and since that time they started looking for where could an asteroid have hit to produce that iridium. And they also found evidence in the rock layers near the KT boundary or KPG boundary of shot quartz.
things called PDFs, and these are the planar deformation features. And they found evidence of the quartz actually has several different planar deformation features indicating that it was under high pressure or some sort of a shock. pressure system that produced this. But again, volcanoes like the Toba caldera in Indonesia Have produced shock quartz from just the volcanic eruptions with over 11 PDFs in one sample.
So just because you find PDFs or shot quartz doesn't mean it was from the impact as well. There's also the lack of many high pressure minerals that should be there and are found in other impacts like cosite and stischevite. These are high-pressure versions of quartz that are not even found at the Chicxuloop site. Remember, the Chicxaloop site is supposed to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, impact. That ever hit the earth.
But yet, we don't see some of the minerals that we find under other smaller impacts at this particular site. We also see a little pseudotacylite. Pseudotacylite is a rock that forms when the outer ring faults from a impact collapse rapidly, and they collapse so rapidly that they cause a melt. And all the wells drilled into the Chicsaloop site, none of them show any pseudotacylite, except for maybe the very outermost ring. Very, very little pseudotacylite.
Other impacts show more pseudotacylate, they show more of these high-pressure minerals. And then we also see a very small amount of melt. The more they drill, the less melt there seems to be. All the models of the impact should show melt that's up to maybe two miles thick. but yet they find melt only a few hundred yards thick, one hundred yards thick to three hundred yards is as thick as they found.
All the indicators of all their computer models from an impact the size that they claim shows tremendous amounts of melt, but yet it's not there. They have unfounded claims of a peak ring. Rock is supposed to shot out of the middle and spread out over the sides, almost in a mushroom shape. Yet they drilled in the most recent well was drilled this last summer in twenty sixteen. and they found five hundred meters of granite, five hundred yards or so of granite.
And so it appears they just hit an uplift, an uplifted basement uplift, like a little small mountain range under the earth. likely just an uplift and not really part of a peak ring. And the latest discovery in 2016 again shows that The latest computer models would show no tsunami. That went out across the Gulf to explain away these deposits that they claim they see in Mexico and across Texas. supposed to be from the asteroid impact.
The actual computer models, the latest computer models show a tsunami hitting the ocean would just cause a big splash locally and it wouldn't send out a big tsunami wave for hundreds of miles in all directions.
So in summary, the global flood offers a better explanation. for the extinction of dinosaurs. Jixalube may not even have been an actual impact. And if it was an impact, it was probably much smaller than we make it out to me. It may just have been an intrusive igneous feature, which is what it was interpreted as prior to the 1980s.
They recognized it was just mag when they came up on that area.
Some melt came through and cooled in the rocks. Gravity, the semicircular gravity anomaly, may just be a consequence of the overlap of the shallow basin they identified that runs to the northeast. and a deep basement uplift that they drilled into with that well hitting that granite. that runs to the northwest. And those two overlap like two heel prints, and that kind of would give you a semicircular shape.
The Chicksaloop site is the iconic secular story for the extinction of dinosaurs because they refuse to believe the historical account of the Bible that there was a flood. God preserved all air-breathing life on the Ark. Any extinction happened after the flood. Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org.
For over 45 years, ICR has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible's accuracy and authority by showing how science supports the Genesis creation account. Our scientists research the evidence for creation and communicate their findings through books, articles, DVD series, and conferences. Please visit our website at icr.org for more information about the latest scientific discoveries, to subscribe to our free magazine and devotional, and to locate our next creation conference at a venue near you. All of this and more at icr.org. If you've enjoyed this podcast, subscribe to Science, Scripture, and Salvation on iTunes.
Also, do us a favor and rate and review the show so that more listeners can find us. Thanks for listening and God bless.
