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Geophysics

		Why study geophysics? Geophysics is the history of the world in solid form. In 1979, Walter Alvarez was sifting through sediments from Gubbio, Italy when he discovered a large amount of a radioactive element that is rare on Earth - but is found in meteors and asteroids. This material called iridium was found in sediments dating to the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, called the K-T boundary. This iridium did not have a terrestrial explanation. Alvarezís research gave support to an already proposed asteroid theory of vast extinctions that have occurred for the past 400 million years or so. We now know that an asteroid, roughly the size of Mount Everest, slammed into what is today the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. About once every 30 to 60 million years, something devastating occurs on our planet.
It is by the study of Geology and it's relationship to life and the evolution of the planet Earth, or "Geosciences", that we can better learn the how, the where, and more importantly, the why of these E.L.E or "Extinction Level Events." The first of these Global Killers slammed into our planet around 440 million years ago in what is known as the Ordovician Period ... The fifth, most well known, and most recent major collision occurred just over 65 million years ago, and would end the Cretaceous Period. This collision with an asteroid resulted in the loss of 75 percent of all species, including the giant marine reptiles, and, the dinosaurs.
		Such an impact would be a complete catastrophy should it occur in modern time. However, a near total extinction need not come from space. Humanity currently has in its possession enough weapons to reproduce such an event. In the event of a full nuclear exchange, the best bomb shelters would be useless. No shelter could withstand such blasts, and those who survived the initial air bursts, radiation, acid rains, plummeting temperatures, lack of food and drinkable water, the resulting devastation of tens of thousands of multi-megaton weapon detonations would destroy all life on our planet. Earth's forests would be burned to dust; the heat from the resulting unchecked fires. The resulting nuclear winter would deprive the oceans of needed sunlight. Oxygen maturation would soon be so depleted that the seas would be unable to support much of their present life forms. Between the heat flash, acid rains, radiation and first rising, then quickly dropping temperatures, the Earth would enter into what could be a decade long ice age.