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K-T Boundary Deposit On The Brazos River (Texas)


Auspex

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I've been reading up on the K-T boundary impact crater, and it seems that a tsunami deposit now exposed in the Brazos River (between Waco and College Station) was instrumental in locating the crater. This, I find fascinating!

If you have been to this site, I would like to hear what it is like.

Thank you :)

  • I found this Informative 1

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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darn - now i want to go there and see if there's a dinosaur sekleton with its head bashed in or sompin. kinda hard to imagine all them poor critters that were just hangin around, mindin their own business, when kablammo! makes the y2k computer-glitch deal seem like semi-small rudebagas. i bought big blue barrels for that and filled them with water.

i just read up on that place - you want me to drive for like three hours or so to check out some smectite spherules and forams?

edit: ok, i'm back. here's what it looked like...

post-488-0-40363200-1303595336_thumb.jpg

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Cool!

Is that glauconite? Smectite?

Man, there is still controversy over this; some study results put the impact up to 800,000 years before the end-Cretaceous boundary. Maybe this one just softened things up for the next two ;)

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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um, ok, i must admit that the picture i posted had nothing to do with the particular tragedy in question. but whatever it is was still a fairly dramatic event.

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We have a possible tsunami deposit also. It has been proposed that the Owl Creek-Clayton boundary is when the impactor struck. Tektites have been found mixed in with the wash (lower Clayton). You also find remains of organisms from the Cretaceous mixed in with the lower parts of the Clayton, which is Paleocene. Interesting stuff.

Brent Ashcraft

ashcraft, brent allen

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Auspex, if I knew exactly where it was, the next time I was near

Waco, I could get some pics for you. I wouldn't mind seeing it

either.

Welcome to the forum!

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I haven't been to the Brazo's deposit but I did research in the "Tsunami" deposits in Eastern Mexico. Some of the so called tsunami deposits may be large storm event deposits. Part of the problem is that the pro-impact people ignore the fact that there are trace fossil burrows in the deposit (indicating that there was enough time between different layers for critters to dig burrows), and another problem is that there's a limestone layer present in many of the deposits. Yes... How do you form a solid limestone layer during a tsunami?

-YvW

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The kind of tsunami this thing would have created within the relatively closed area of the Gulf would have sloshed back-and-forth a few times. How long does it take for a shallow marine burrower to dig a new bomb shelter in loose silt? The tops of these burrows are also missing; could they have been "topped" by the next, lesser, wave?

As for a limestone layer, how thick is it? If thin, could a nice layer of dead forams (both newly dead, and displaced from existing bottom silt) account for it? There would have been a lapse of time between "sloshes", and each succeeding one would have had less energy to scour as deep as the preceding one.

The above is my curiosity run amok, looking for alternate interpretations of the evidence. In other words, I'm having fun :)

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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  • 2 years later...

I am looking for references on any Texas K-T boundary deposits. Please list a few.

I found this: LINK

Maybe some of the folks mentioned can give more specific information.

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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Questions like this are always difficult to answer without knowing what you’ve already perused, what your angle of interest is (palaeontological, geological or whatever) and how deep into the subject you want to go. Nevertheless, here’s a few:

The 2007 Keller et al. paper “Chicxulub impact predates K–T boundary: New evidence from Brazos, Texas” is here:

http://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/keller/Keller_et_al_2007_EPSL_Brazos.pdf

Schulte et al. were critical of that paper and their criticism was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (2008). Keller et al. responded to the criticisms and you can read the defence of their opinions here:

http://www.falw.vu/~smit/debates/brazos-comments.htm

There’s a pretty comprehensive bibliography (including abstracts) for “End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction and the Chicxulub Impact in Texas” provided by Keller in 2011 here:

http://sepm.org/CM_Files/publications/sp100_abstracts.pdf

More recently, there is this interpretation from Hart et al. which disputes a pre-extinction impact: “The Cretaceous-Palaeogene Boundary on the Brazos River, Texas: New Stratigraphic Sections & Revised Interpretations” published in 2012:

http://www.gcags.org/Journal/2012.gcags.journal/GCAGS.Journal.2012.vol1.p69-80.Hart.et.al.pdf

You might also be interested in “Drilling K-T and Chicxulub Event Strata in Texas”:

http://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/keller/brazos.html

  • I found this Informative 3

Roger

I keep six honest serving-men (they taught me all I knew);Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who [Rudyard Kipling]

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I found this: LINK

Maybe some of the folks mentioned can give more specific information.

quite a nice repository of panoramic impact crater photos there to enjoy also, thanks!

"Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile." Lepidus

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  • 2 years later...

I got a post about the K-T boundary in texas. I need Identification. The name of the post is K-T boundary in Texas? But I found it in Comal County texas.

 

"Without fossils, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the earth" - Georges Cuvier

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