K/T boundary stratigraphy: Evidence for multiple impacts and a possible comet stream

A critical set of observations bearing on the K/T boundary events were obtained from several dozen sites in western North America. Thin strata at and adjacent to the K/T boundary are locally preserved in association with coal beds at these sites. The strata were laid down in local shallow basins that were either intermittently flooded or occupied by very shallow ponds. Detailed examination of the stratigraphy at numerous sites led to the recognition of two distinct strata at the boundary. From the time that the two strata were first recognized, E.M. Shoemaker has maintained that they record two impact events. We report some of the evidence that supports this conclusion

THE EFFECT OF FEEDGRAIN PROGRAM PARTICIPATION ON CHEMICAL USE

Economic incentives created by the commodity programs are hypothesized to cause program participants to apply agrichemicals at greater rates than nonparticipants. Corn producers who participate in the USDA feedgrain program are shown to apply nitrogen, herbicides, and insecticides at statistically greater rates than those who do not participate.Crop Production/Industries,

Chemical fractionation of siderophile elements in impactites from Australian meteorite craters

The abundance pattern of siderophile elements in terrestrial and lunar impact melt rocks was used extensively to infer the nature of the impacting projectiles. An implicit assumption made is that the siderophile abundance ratios of the projectiles are approximately preserved during mixing of the projectile constituents with the impact melts. As this mixture occurs during flow of strongly shocked materials at high temperatures, however there are grounds for suspecting that the underlying assumption is not always valid. In particular, fractionation of the melted and partly vaporized material of the projectile might be expected because of differences in volatility, solubility in silicate melts, and other characteristics of the constituent elements. Impactites from craters with associated meteorites offer special opportunities to test the assumptions on which projectile identifications are based and to study chemical fractionation that occurred during the impact process

Mining for Observables: A New Challenge in Numerical Relativity

One of the motivations behind numerical relativity is to provide gravitational wave signals of compact objects to observers using the new gravitational wave detectors. Yet, because of the complexities involved, no dependable signals of binary-black hole coalescences have been established. The work in this proceedings is motivated by how numerical relativity can be used today to predict robust features in gravitational wave signals of binary black-hole coalescence by making approximations to the full problem. To illustrate this, we present results from evolving a Klein-Gordon equation on a frozen background. The background is set by a sequence of initial data in which the binary is in quasi-equilibrium. We probe the data resulting from the evolution for the transition between the linear and non-linear regimes using oscillations of the black holes as our guide. This information is used to motivate a qualitative picture of the gravitational signal of a black-hole coalescence