On Dinosaurs and Other Deep Impacts
Recently, I picked up Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.
I’ve been in love with these prehistoric critters since I was a kid. Even as an adult, I keep up on the latest dino discoveries. And there have been a lot. In my lifetime, we’ve moved away from seeing dinosaurs as plain lizard-like creatures to animals festooned in vibrant feathers. Once, they were perceived as slow and dim-witted. Now, we appreciate them as complicated, social creatures.
We have also discovered the reason for their demise—an asteroid that smacked into the earth sixty-six million years ago. The impact crater was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico by Pemex, a Mexican state-owned oil company, in the 1960’s, but it wasn’t until the 1970’s that scientists proposed the impact site as “the ecological murder weapon” that ended the age of the dinosaurs.
The scale of the disaster was staggering.
The Moment of Impact Sixty Six Million Years Ago
As author Riley Black noted everything about this event was “so great that the numbers veer off into the ridiculous”.
The explosion from the impact was the equivalent of 1,000,000,000 Hiroshimas.
Yes, you read those zeros right.
One billion Hiroshimas.
The Impact Crater Left Behind
The asteroid that struck the earth was the size of Mount Everest and hit so hard physicists theorize that it “would have been powerful enough to blow many terrestrial dinosaurs in the vicinity into space”. It melted the earth’s mantle and triggered earthquakes estimated to be between 9 and 11 on the Richter scale.
More than 12,000 cubic miles of pulverized rock were blown into the atmosphere. A debris cloud swaddled the earth in a thick blanket and cooled the planet by almost 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
The “impact winter” that followed lasted fifteen years. Any dinosaurs who managed to survive the initial impact perished when the temperature plunged.
Cosmic Horror Calamity: Chthulu Rising
These mind-boggling statistics got me to thinking about the limitations I face when I write cosmic horror. The problem is simple: there is no way to write these kinds of big events, not if you want the world as you know it to survive.
If a big event occurred (say, Cthulhu rising out of his watery prison or extra-dimensional creatures punching into our world), your characters are toast, blown out of the water like those poor dinos near the impact site. Not just your characters. Humanity itself might be threatened with annihilation. Who would be left behind to tell the story then? You might be able to do it using found footage, but even if the material survived, who would be left to discover it?
If you want to keep your characters alive, you need to keep things small and manageable. You need a glancing blow instead of a deep impact. But small and manageable…well, it’s so less dramatic.
This is the issue I’m wrestling with as I work on the third novel in my series, Shadow Zone. I want my characters to encounter something big, something that challenges them like never before. But it can’t be a grand event because I want my characters to survive (it is a series, after all!). I want them to be stretched to their breaking point, but unlike the dinosaurs, I want them to survive.
So what event am I planning for my characters?
I’m still working out the details.
Stay tuned for more…
Until then, enjoy this clip about the last day of the dinosaurs.