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TODAY Wednesday 29 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Duck! (Again)

More and more do I enjoy discussions of when a giant asteroid or comet is going to smash into the Earth and kill off most of its life forms. Perhaps this is because I am resentful and a little bitter that subjects covered extensively, even tediously, in this space -- climate change and fuel cells, for example -- are now featured regularly in middlebrow publications with nine thousand times our circulation. Perhaps I am possessed of the small-minded tendency to feel spurned when an issue heretofore "belonging" to my tiny peer group receives the broad discussion we say we seek. I need to worry about big things, but maybe only big things that not many people are paying attention to yet. When public issues go public, what happens to my special angle on life? Oh, global warming, yeah, that old thing. Fabulous non-polluting hydrogen-fuel cars? Yawn.

Besides, I can now add, with insouciance, that all this won't matter very much when some big mofo slams into Central America. This "sustainability" stuff is just more Homo sapiens' over-reaching. A celestial object took out the dinosaurs and it will take out us. A new anxiety, with the advantage of being extremely difficult to do anything about. Nuke the 'roids? Vacate the premises?

So it was with a superior kind of pleasure that I came across the excellent article in Natural History by Neil de Grasse Tyson, the director of New York's Hayden Planetarium ("Duck!"). Tyson reports on the state of catastrophism, which says that you can pretty much predict the frequency, size, and damage of asteroids and comets that penetrate the earth's atmosphere. Every few million years, he tells us, an enormous object blindsides the earth and causes an appalling number of extinctions. A crater off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico gives testimony to the Chicxulub impact of 65 million years ago that, according to Tyson, killed off more than 90% of the Earth's species.

Thankfully, we have readers who pay attention and know a few things. One of them is Danielle Luttenberg, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here's her e-mail:

"Unfortunately I think Tyson has his numbers wrong. In my pre-NOAA days I studied paleo-oceanography and just completed my M.S. thesis on some of the effects of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) impact on open ocean ecosystems, which is why I'm familiar with these numbers. It was the Permian-Triassic (P-T) extinction that took 90% of species with it (by the way, there is some speculation that that extinction was also caused by an impact). The K-T wiped out a 'mere' 57%, although some families, like marine reptiles and some zooplankton were much harder hit - 90% or more. Interested readers should look for articles by J. Sepkoski and D. Raup for the various mass extinctions in the geologic records and their relative effects."

Anyone else who wants to join this discussion is welcome. For my part, the knowledge that apocalypse lurks in the heavens is a big plus for the human spirit. Besides giving elitists ammunition for one-upsmanship at cocktail receptions (speaking professionally), the giant asteroids and comets provide us with a reminder of the death that awaits all things; and death, as Wallace Stevens liked to remind us, is the giver of all beauty.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

If you don't like death from the sky, how about a new outbreak of plague? Check out the frightening (and not unlikely) possibilities described by Dr. Paul Epstein in his High Fives feature on Health and Global Change.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

10/28: Civil Society and Conservation
10/27: Who Owns the National Forests?
10/24: Meanwhile, Back at the Infirmary...
10/23: "Heading Down the Right Path"
10/22: Markets and Medium-Greens
10/21: The Silver Republic and the People's Republic
10/20: Duck!
10/17: The Energy Non-Crisis
10/16: Drillbit Diplomacy
10/15: We Love You, Hiroshi Okuda

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.