Charles (Chuck) Bryant

But that's why I love science is people keep poking around and the fringe nut maybe one day is proven somewhat right.

And that, well, I still think that the melt water is probably the reason why.

But one of the other hypotheses is the impact hypothesis.

And that is, like you said, was pretty controversial until more recently.

It has gained a little bit of traction because some things do kind of add up.

But the idea here is that a meteorite or a comet or something impacted the Earth, maybe an airburst even.

And that released a thermal pulse that kind of set the world on fire almost like all these massive wildfires across all the continents.

The air is filled with soot.

It's blocking sunlight.

And in fact, there's so much soot, there's atmospheric dust such that you reduce solar radiation and all of a sudden you have what's called an impact winter or, you know, kind of like the idea of a nuclear winter.

Yeah.

And the other thing, there's a couple of more sort of smaller points that might support this.

One is there was a platinum spike in South Africa that preceded the YD and in some other places.

And platinum is, you know, a lot of time within meteorites.

So maybe some support there.

And also sometimes people kind of combine the first one and say maybe there was an impact combined with this meltwater thing.

So there was a low atmospheric explosion over North America, and that's what released all this meltwater all over the place.

Yeah, let's go get a drink and just settle it.

Oh, yeah.

I think so.