Tea at Trianon: Dinosaur Killers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Dinosaur Killers

From Scientific American:

What killed the dinosaurs? Scientists have long debated whether it was an asteroid that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago or a powerful wave of volcanic eruptions at that time. Two papers published today in Science say the real answer is— both, in a catastrophic coincidence. But the two teams of researchers disagree on a key point: whether the impact from space came first and boosted the eruptions into a climate-altering, dinosaur-killing frenzy, or whether they were two unrelated disasters with remarkably bad timing for the beasts that once stalked our planet and still stomp through our minds.

After decades of arguments between asteroid advocates and volcano boosters, in 2015 some scientists suggested both might be right, because an asteroid impact in Mexico—marked by a crater named Chicxulub—may have created seismic waves that shook the planet so violently that it sped up ongoing volcanic activity under India. That magma, in a region called the Deccan Traps, exploded in sunlight-dimming eruptions that chilled the climate, and then their release of carbon dioxide would have warmed it—a whiplash few creatures could survive. The idea was eruptions and impact together may have wiped-out the dinosaurs along with nearly 70 percent of species in a mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. (Read more.)