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| Upcoming A* art and art sales--the plan! | Apr 30, 2019 9:48 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I seem to be doing better with my schedule these days, so I intend to get back to getting more art out. : )
First, if you were hanging around here a couple years back you may remember I was going through my A* art archives and, generally on Wednesdays, digging up an unsold piece I felt was one of my very best efforts and putting it up for sale on eBay—at a special low opening bid price, instead of the $50 fixed price most art pieces sell for here on my site. That series of archive art sales was pretty successful : ), in fact I guess it was so successful I kind of ran out of favorite pieces of mine.
But it's been a year or two and some of the pages from the last bunch of A* episodes fall into that category, so I'm going to be resurrecting the Wednesday A* art archive sales to find homes for them. : ) There are only eh oh 8 or 9 or so if I remember correctly (maybe I'll go way back into the bins and see if I can find some older stuff I really like that I didn't spot before, I guess we'll see how these go : o), so keep an eye out if you're interested; these sales, with their opening bid prices of just $16.99, might go by fairly quickly—maybe not weekly, but semi-weekly or so, depending on what else is going on.
Which may include *new* special art pieces; also a few years back, I wanted to start doing a semi-regular series of special A* pieces, mostly in vertical format for a change, where I could just draw whatever nice A*-y thing I wanted. I think I've just about got my weekend schedule buckled down now, along with the weekday schedule, so in the coming months I want to start painting new special pieces here and there—they would also go up for auction starting at $16.99.
They'd be probably like the one I managed before, 10" x 12":
but they won't necessarily be Selenis in an evening gown. Although maybe they should be. = o Well they're just a place to have fun with A* art, so we'll see where the whims will take me.
I will of course advertise this stuff in the blog and social media as I get them done; you can also keep an eye on my eBay listings if you really want to get a drop on things—that's where you'll see my auctions for the daily watercolor art generated for all the new A* pages, too. : ]
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| No traditional prints; other decluttering | Apr 29, 2019 9:25 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Sunday and today I got to messing around with the site and getting a few things out of the way:
- I removed the (crossed-out) "commission me" link from the site menu; even crossed out, it was bothering me somehow. Nobody used it anyway, so now we're just back to the old state of affairs that worked previously, where people who are serious enough about hiring me to do some art for them just contact me through social media or email or whatever and we discuss it. : )
- Removed print ordering for traditional media artwork on the site—A* watercolor pages, ink artwork, etc. Although people buy A*'s original artwork regularly (thank you! ^_^), prints of that artwork sell, like, once in a blue moon, if that, and for print-on-demand prints like these were, it just wasn't worthwhile.
I've left print ordering for the older, digital artwork, since there was never an original piece to obtain for those and eh I felt like I should leave *some* way to get a physical version of them if one should happen to be wanted. ... I should probably take those down too at some point since they still aren't really cost-effective either. : P
- I moved the bottom border of the area of the comic image you can click to turn the page up a little; it was hanging down past the bottom of the image—past the subtitle bar—which was intentional, to make it easier to discover for mouse users who might have been moving their mouse upward, following the little bent arrow indicator in the navigation bar below the comic—but that left the page-turny click area close enough to the big new "menu" toggle link that, on my cell phone screen, my clumsy fingers were pretty good at accidentally turning the page when they'd meant to toggle the menu. And there's now a big text explanation below the nav bar area for clicking the image to turn the page anyway, so the reason for dangling the page clicky area down below the page is no longer present. I think. Anyway I did this thing!
So that's about moving/removing some stuff; tomorrow I'll talk about plans to bring some art stuff back, from those wild, halcyon days of 2017. : )
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| There's always time for | Apr 26, 2019 11:28 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:We've hit the end of the week and I haven't left myself enough time for blogging. I'll try to do everything better next week!!
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| How did it get this late? | Apr 25, 2019 10:33 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Okay this is *probably* the last upside-down page for a while. o :
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| Where would we be without cardboard | Apr 24, 2019 9:54 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Gotta go box up some A* pages to carry to the post office tomorrow. : )
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| Feeling blue might not be the worst | Apr 23, 2019 10:03 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I got to tinkering around with the text on the original art buying pages today—for instance, the one for episode 36, page 57; just trying to clarify some small points, particularly that the lighting and colors in the photos I show on that page isn't as accurate as the color in the main, scanned versions of the art—the ones that appear as part of the comic itself, for instance.
My photo set up consists just of an old Canon PowerShot compact digital camera (they're so cute and tiny! : ) and my drawing table, and the lighting tends to come out either too yellowish or too bluish, depending on which of the bulbs in my drawing table lamps I turn on for the photo; in recent years I've erred toward the blue side of things because it looks less icky than the yellow. : P
So anyway, if you notice a difference in the colors between the cropped, scanned version of the art, and the photo version, where you can see it's sitting on my drawing table (a tip-off there is that you can see the edges of the artwork, and my messy drawing table paper cover behind it), the colors in the scanned version will be more reliable. : )
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| The page isn't upside-down : o : | Apr 22, 2019 10:52 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:To save you from turning your monitor upside-down (not advised : o), here's today's page art turned the other way around on my drawing table:
Posting pages with the main character upside-down is kind of unsettling. o =
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| I just realized Monday isn't a holiday : P | Apr 19, 2019 10:46 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I got to send to a reader for supporting the comic through my Patreon campaign : ) :
Patreon is my main source of income, and I really appreciate everyone who's helping me keep the comic going! You can join the campaign for as little as $1 a month, and at even higher levels you can get nifty monthly rewards like e-books and sketches.
So a huge thanks to everyone who's doing that, and to those buying the original A* artwork, and to you folks reading the comic. : )
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| New big brush! | Apr 18, 2019 10:08 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I got a new ½" brush! That's the big square one I use to cover large areas with watercolor; it replaces my very *first* ½" brush, which I'd had ever since I first started painting the comic in watercolor. That one was worn down to a tiny nub of its original size—kind of interesting how the bristles dropped out from the outside in, so it wore down in this really smooth way. But it couldn't carry as much paint as it used to, couldn't make marks as big as it used to (it's probably more of a ⅓" brush now : o), and didn't have corners as sharp as it used to—and this new one is much snappier, too! Been using it since Friday's page.
New brushes are fun. ^_^
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| Singapore's A*STAR | Apr 17, 2019 9:20 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:"Molecular biology pioneer" Sydney Brenner passed away recently; a "South African of Lithuanian descent," Brenner "helped establish the role played by the molecule RNA," among many other things—but the reason I cite this BBC article in particular is its final bit: "In his later years, he put much effort into building scientific capacity in Singapore. And it was the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore's lead public sector research agency, that announced Sydney Brenner's death on Friday morning."
: o A*STAR (that's the Wikipedia link; their official web site is awfully pokey—I couldn't get it working in Firefox, and only parts in Chrome, but I did notice that their "about" page says "We are trusted to always act in the best interest of Singapore"—so that's good to know) is run by Singapore's government, and operates themed R&D hubs named Biopolis and Fusionopolis (there's Fusionopolis One and Fusionopolis Two, which rather disappointingly look mostly like fancy modern office buildings).
My naming scheme would see their name pronounced "a star star," but I'm guessing they don't pronounce it that way. : P
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| Eerily synchronized SpaceX booster landing | Apr 16, 2019 8:47 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:If there's anything that says "the future is now," it might be this simultaneous triple booster landing by SpaceX last week; the boosters were returning from delivering the company's first commercial payload, and it was the first time they'd managed to land all three of a flight's lower boosters. (BBC)
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| We're minus Google+ | Apr 15, 2019 8:56 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Google's "Google+" social network, which was basically their attempt to copy Facebook, finally shut down uh a week or two ago; you get the feeling they'd become kind of embarrassed by it.
Aside from a certain amount of "anyone but Facebook" early adopters, G+ didn't quite manage to catch on, at least not to whatever gonzo scale would have made Alphabet or whatever happy. It had a concept of uh "circles" or whatever, where you could group people into bunches and then I think it was like specify what kinds of posts they got to see, or something like that—well anyway it had some interesting ways of being able to segment what you were posting. Maybe that's what they've kept around for the enterprise version that they say is still in use; I can see how "circles" might map pretty decently to workgroups or something.
But for we consumers, no more G+. I just wanted somewhere to leave my old G+ page links; first there was the eye-catching https://www.google.com/+smbhax, which was supposed to be the format of your official G+ URL, but I didn't end up using it; I'd completely forgotten about this address, in fact, until I was removing the regular one and found it hidden in a comment in my "about" page HTML. I think maybe the problem with it was that it was just a link to a profile page, rather than a page with your actual posts on it, which is what people would actually want to see. But that's just a guess; I don't actually remember what it went to.
The link I used and the link I provided on the site was this behemoth https://plus.google.com/b/105302017806135303872/105302017806135303872/posts, which I figured out *did* go to my page of posts.
Now they finally go to the same spot. : P
And that was Google+.
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| Sometimes just wanna stare into the distance | Apr 13, 2019 1:22 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's an ink sketch I got to send to a reader for supporting the comic through my Patreon campaign : ) :
You can help me make this comic with just $1 a month through Patreon, which I very, very much appreciate! And at even higher support levels you can get yourself nifty A* rewards each month, like e-books and sketches.
However you decide to support A*—even simply by reading the comic : )—I am grateful for the time and effort you devoted to this little scifi endeavor. ^o^
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| Space body changes; private moon crash | Apr 11, 2019 10:08 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Two space articles from The New York Times today:
Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same.
Changes to the astronaut's body are compared with those of his twin brother, who remained on Earth.
Moon Landing by Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Appears to End in Crash
It would have been the first landing of a private spacecraft on the Moon.
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| First black hole imaged: M87* | Apr 11, 2019 1:03 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:
image by Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (source)
^ That is the result of the first-ever successful imaging of a black hole; specifically, it shows radio emissions from a ring of plasma rotating at nearly the speed of light around the "shadow" cast by the enormous gravity of the 6.5 billion-solar-mass supermassive black hole M87* at the center of galaxy Messier 87 ("M87"), 53 million light years away from our own galaxy.
The Event Horizon Telescope ("EHT") collaboration, which released the image yesterday, says
"The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across."
Reuters, in a well-written article, notes that puts M87*'s event horizon at "about three times the size of Pluto's orbit around the sun."
The EHT is an international scientific consortium using a global network of coordinated radio telescopes to image black holes. Their other major target is the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the radio source designated Sagittarius A*—but A*, a smaller black hole, at about 4 million solar masses, currently does not have a nice glowy accretion disk around it like M87*, which is actively sucking in material, does; and our view of A* is edge-on, so if there was a disk, it would overlap the hole, possibly spoiling the view anyway, although it might be bent or "lensed" around the hole, visually, by the hole's gravity—and, probably more importantly, there's tens of thousands of light years of galactic arm dust and gas between us and our own galactic center. Also, A* is not solidly "on" like M87* is, so its output fluctuates widely, "on the scale of minutes rather than days"; EHT's scans of M87* ran 3-7 minutes each.
Those scans took place on four separate days in 2017; the graphic shown is the result of a very sophisticated cross-analysis of the radio wave readings from the individual telescopes, correlating them into a composite reading, correcting for delays and atmospheric effects, and then constructing an image out of this signal by running it through imaging algorithms based on the most current scientific theories of how light behaves in the proximity of a black hole; and the result is the anticipated lopsided ring, lopsided because light from the side of the tilted accretion disk that is rotating (clockwise) in our direction hits us more energetically than light from the side that is rotating away. Although construction of the image made use of current theory, the fact that the underlying observed data resulted in an image strongly corresponding to simulations suggests that current black hole models, and the general relativity equations from which they are derived, are not too far off-base from reality.
Messier 87 is relatively close to our own galaxy, and its supermassive black hole is the largest as seen from Earth, besides A*. M87 is an elliptical-type galaxy, composed of a smooth scattering of stars, rather than a spiral-type galaxy of dusty arms like the Milky Way, so although possibly 200 times as massive as our galaxy, M87 does not have much interstellar dust blocking our view of its center, and we see it from a diagonal view, not edge on to the accretion disk around the central black hole; and not directly overhead, in which case we'd only see a bright glow, because M87*, actively feeding on about 90 Earth masses of material per day, is shooting out a stream of energetic particles perpendicular to its accretion disk: the visible (to the Hubble Space Telescope) part of this stream projects 5,000 light years into space, surrounded by "the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unseen stars and the yellow, point-like globular clusters that make up this galaxy"; Hubble's composite green, blue, ultraviolet, and infrared photo of it was my initial inspiration for making a sci-fi comic:
image by NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) (source)
The comic was going to be called "Messier 87"; but then I found that our own galaxy has a supermassive black hole, and that made a lot more sense for travel time—also, being much smaller and less active, it is less radioactive. ^_^
If you'd like to read more, there is first and foremost the scientific paper, which is surprisingly readable, with all sorts of neat details and terms: the lopsidedness of the imaged ring inside a black hole's "photon capture radius" is "because of fast rotation and relativistic beaming" as well as "strong gravitational lensing," for instance, and they derived the new 6.5 billion-solar-mass estimate of M87* from the size of its imaged ring. The paper also shows separate images of the black hole from the EHT's four days of observation, in which you can see the hole's ring fluctuate quite a bit—and they show sharp simulations of black hole accretion disks, ie what they think M87 would look like, were it in perfect focus: a fairly thin, possibly unclosed loop of rapidly spinning plasma.
In more bite-sized proportions, the CBC has a pretty good and still fairly lengthy article on all this.
The BBC says (their article also includes a photo of scientist Katie Bauman, who wrote one of the EHT's imaging algorithms, with some of the "hundreds" of hard drives carrying the data that were flown in for processing; they also show a lovely photo of the participating South Pole Telescope in Antarctica) that Heino Falcke, the professor from the Netherlands' Radboud University who proposed the experiment, "recalled reading a scientific paper from 1973 that suggested that because of their enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times larger than they actually are"—which encouraged him in his idea of trying to image a black hole, "arguing his case for 20 years".
EHT has a very good, concise article on their M87* image—the quote at the beginning of this blog entry came from their first footnote—but they just slapped their article on the home page of their web site https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ and failed to provide a permanent link to it.
Reuters says there is "optimism" about getting an image of A*, "perhaps within a year." The EHT's sixth footnote says "Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope"—those would be in addition to the eight radio telescopes that took the 2017 M87* readings: "ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope."
The EHT's scientific paper sums up:
"In conclusion, we have shown that direct studies of the event horizon shadow of supermassive black hole candidates are now possible via electromagnetic waves, thus transforming this elusive boundary from a mathematical concept to a physical entity that can be studied and tested via repeated astronomical observations."
Thanks @elephande and @koboldskeep for links and info used in compiling this blog entry. : )
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| I broke webcomic index sites : o | Apr 09, 2019 11:42 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The internet is blessed with a number of webcomic index sites that tell their users when their favorite webcomics have actually updated; my recent radical streamlining of the A* site's default front page view broke three of these : o —that is, I inadvertently trimmed out something they were reading that told them a new A* page had appeared, so they hadn't registered any new updates to A* since March 21st, when I changed the front page layout.
I replaced the thing one of them was reading yesterday, so that one's working now, more or less (although its database appears to be down at the moment, so the webcomic update listing is just an SQL error message. I don't think that was my doing, though! = o). Hoping the others were reading the same thing and they'll catch up in a day or so—but that hasn't happened in the day and a half since I fixed the thing, so they probably need something else. : P I'll have to contact their people if they're still not catching A* updates by the weekend.
Then there's the other index site that says I haven't updated in 108 months and 1 week. : o
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| There is no bug | Apr 08, 2019 10:40 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Fixed a few tiny bugs with the new front page menu-hidden layout—hopefully tiny enough that only I really noticed! = o : j
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| A scarf is just an erased mouth : o | Apr 05, 2019 11:11 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I got to send to a reader for supporting the comic through my Patreon campaign : ):
I couldn't make this comic without the support of you the readers, so thank you very much for letting me do this. = D
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| Hide the space honey | Apr 04, 2019 10:57 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:NASA is sending flying robots to the International Space Station. Shaped like cubes, with sides maybe about one foot in length, NASA is nevertheless calling them "bees"; they propel themselves with an embedded fan, and have a robotic arm.
The "bees" "can operate in either fully automated mode or under remote control by astronauts or researchers on Earth."
The remote control part seems potentially useful; in fact, there probably isn't a whole lot of reason for humans to be on the ISS at all—whatever tasks they do there could almost certainly be handled by adequate automation or remote monitoring and control. But putting citizens in space is big PR for national space programs, and gives we humans those warm fuzzy feelings, to get us all excited about space stuff.
I am less excited about the "fully automated mode" for the "bees." Do you really want giant flying bees trapped with you in your home, far from aid? I don't know if the people making these decisions at NASA have seen enough sci-fi movies, because we all know how these things end up going. : o
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| Almost everything I know about PHP | Apr 03, 2019 11:42 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The entire smbhax.com domain was down for 20 minutes or so this morning; fortunately I was tidying up some news archive scripts at the time so I ran into the "500 Internal Server Error" message in my web browser right away; usually that error message means I made a typo in my Perl script editing, but no typo I could make could cause that error to happen to every single page in the domain!
I gave my web host's tech support a jingle and they were able to find the problem pretty quick: what they supposed was a routine update to their Apache web server software seemed to have taken a dislike to an old PHP workaround I'd put in place for the phpBB forum I used to host for A* (specifically, it was "php_flag allow_url_fopen on" in .htaccess files : P—I think my version of phpBB needed that in order for users to be able to upload images or something); I no longer host the forum—or any other PHP scripts on the site whatsoever as far as I can recall...—so I just removed the old PHP scraps, and the site magically worked again. Yay! : P
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| Art commissions are closed : P | Apr 03, 2019 12:58 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hopefully you didn't notice, but the watercolor painting for today's page was actually about an inch too narrow—15" rather than the usual 16—so for the webcomic version I had to fill in a half-inch on either side with Photoshop's "Clone" tool or whatever it's called; if you want to see what the page actually looks like, you can check out the original scan (and photo) on eBay.
(Insert joke about this being fate since this page is the first one in A*'s history to feature two more or less fully conscious Selenis clones actually together in the same room. : P)
The original art is the wrong size (hey, collector's item! =pp) because I measured wrong when cutting the large watercolor sheet up into A*-page-sized pieces over the weekend. And that happened I guess because well I got sloppy after years of doing this but also because I was tired and stressed and in a hurry (insert joke about robot's dialogue) because as usual I was behind where I wanted to be in getting A* tasks done for the day.
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On a pretty nearly directly related note, here's what I had written up and ready to go for today's blog before that little page size emergency emerged:
I've closed my art commission service for now; just getting the daily comic done seems to be taking all my time, so I have no business pretending that I can possibly complete quality art commissions for people at the same time!
If and when I manage to work things out so that I can take on commission work again, I'll post a notice in the blog and on social media—and the "commission me" link on the front page menu will no longer be crossed out, and a text blurb about commissions being open will appear in light blue text below the front page menu's social media bar.
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I'm working on the whole time management thing. It's been a little rocky what with all the 10th anniversary hullabaloo recently (and I had sworn off extensive blogging for a while but then that huge day the dinosaurs died New Yorker piece happened, and then today this happened : P)...but I have been making some adjustments and even with that I've mostly been able to start actual drawing work an hour or two earlier each day than I had been, so that's been helping the art, at least, I think. There's a bit more time savings that could theoretically be had there, even, if I can get myself habituated to the necessary day-management discipline.
And I'm way better than I was hm up to probably about three years ago now, where my time management was so bad that after getting reset for Monday morning, my daily schedule would soon break to such an extent that I was completely off the Earth's day/night cycle by late in the week. : P
But the painting today got tricky (*probably* because I was tired from letting myself stay up too late blogging yesterday, so I didn't catch some scale issues in the drawing of Selenis flying into the scene here, and they thus had to get worked out in the painting phase), so now I kick into emergency time plan, which involves me allowing myself to sleep in to mostly catch a full night's sleep despite the late hour, in exchange for having to skip exercising tomorrow. ; P Oh well variety, or something!
Okay I need to stop writing now.
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| A rough day in the Cretaceous | Apr 01, 2019 10:05 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The New Yorker recently posted a fascinating article called The Day the Dinosaurs Died, about somewhat unorthodox young paleontologist Robert DePalma's discovery of a site in Nebraska that may be a direct recording of the meteor-spawned global cataclysm 65 million years ago wiping out life on Earth.
The meteor strike was so powerful ("the energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a 'rooster tail,' a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere"—the BBC, incidentally, got this exactly wrong, posting a mushroom-cloud-type effect in their thumbnail of an article about the impending release of DePalma's group research paper) that
"Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth."
Another interesting space-related note from the article: "He'd also found scores of beautiful examples of lonsdaleite, a hexagonal form of diamond that is associated with impacts; it forms when carbon in an asteroid is compressed so violently that it crystallizes into trillions of microscopic grains, which are blasted into the air and drift down."
That's about all the space-specific stuff; I suppose I should include a note of caution about reading the very lengthy article in full: it paints a blow-by-blow, extremely harrowing picture of what was pretty much the end of the world as it existed to that point. I was haunted by brain-conjured images of it for days after reading the article. In fact, I'm going to roll in some quotes about it here, so maybe just skip the rest of this blog entry if it all sounds a bit much to you. : o
Still here? Okay then.
Because lines like "more than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died" kind of stick around in your head, you know? But how did they die? Ah.
"The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests."
That isn't even the most vivid stuff, though: that comes from working out how, at this dig site in Nebraska, jumbled, torn-up bits of Cretaceous life (this was the precise moment the Cretaceous ended; DePalma, as the writer watched him work, even found a small mammal's burrow in the fossilized mud layers: surviving, it would seem, the end of the Cretaceous, it had dug into the solidified mud for protection, and died in its burrow in the Paleogene, where it remained for 65 million years, until he found and carefully extracted it—in fact, its whole burrow—for analysis) ended up being preserved in almost minute-by-minute layers of sediment, laid down as nearly unimaginable violence completely destroyed the area over what may have been an hour or so of absolute disaster, with a fine rain of molten rock—yes, blasted up from the impact in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, near an eventual Mayan town of Chicxulub, 3000 miles distant from Nebraska—seen now embedded in the layers of mud, and fossilized fish gills, as glassy beads called microtektites—coming down, probably setting fire to everything flammable while an incredibly powerful quake shot through the Earth, shaking the surface so strongly that local bodies of water agitated violently, surging back and forth so powerfully that many of the fossilized creatures were torn apart in large pieces before they were buried; they even found one large ancient fish embedded in another, their bodies thrown together with such force that the sturgeon's bony back plates impaled the paddlefish.
The theory proposed by the researchers is that what made this site possible, with its unique layers of fossils and embedded microtektites, was that it was at just the right distance to be reached by the asteroid impact's seismic waves and aerial debris at the same time, and that a local body of water was in just the right position to wash over the area repeatedly when agitated. Although the site, which DePalma dubbed "Tanis," is near the edge of what was at that time a large, shallow inland sea stretching right up through North America from the Gulf, "the KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact." "[UW geophysicist Mark] Richards had previously estimated that the worldwide earthquake generated by the KT impact could have been a thousand times stronger than the biggest earthquake ever experienced in human history. Using that gauge, he calculated that potent seismic waves would have arrived at Tanis six minutes, ten minutes, and thirteen minutes after the impact."
So, the next time you feel like you've just had a rough hour or so, think about that scene from 65 million years ago. Or maybe don't. : o
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