Chicxulub and Politics

Vineyard Haven, MA ~ September 6, 2016

During last year's U.S. presidential election campaign, I spotted a bumper sticker about a giant meteor on the rear bumper of a pickup truck. It carried an apocalyptic message: "Just end it already."

This nihilistic sarcasm about an "extinction level event" being a better option than Trump or Clinton was also on Twitter where it boasted its candidate was the only one "with a plan that's guaranteed to defeat ISIS."

Giant Meteor 2016 from jonah oskow on Vimeo.

For those interested in the real thing, the ongoing research into the 110-mile-wide Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico, formed 66 million years ago, is a good place to start. See The New York Times: Drilling into the Chicxulub Crater, Ground Zero of the Dinosaur Extinction.

Detlev van Ravenswaay ~ Science Source

I'm not ready to "Make America a Crater Again," but do appreciate the doomsday humor, including this cartoon from this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Will McPhail ~ The New Yorker