This is a continuation of the story "Remember The Cretaceous Nights." I originally wrote this while I was in College studying Geology...but after digging it up I 'cleaned it up' a little to include a little more of what has been learned about the events of the late Cretaceous and early Tertiary. In this story, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Hillingsworth learn more about their plight in this bygone era, and face one of the greatest calamities known not only to man, but to life on Earth in general...the meteorite impact in the present day Yucatan Penninsula of Mexico that caused the events which ultimately brought an end to the Dinosaurs, and opened the door to the proliferation of mammals and other species that would eventually become so important to our lives today. Again, it is somewhat 'out there' but it was fun to write. It should be fun to read...
Remember The Cretaceous Nights....
Chapter One, Part Two
Dr. Johnson looked skyward through a telescope. He had noticed a couple bodies that just didn’t seem to be moving consistently with stars or planets. It had now been several years, and they realized that the meteor showers seemed to be densest around mid September, but by November, the streaks in the sky would almost disappear. As he observed the nature of the meteor showers, though, he also took note of two large bodies that were hurtling through the heavens. Although he was not an astronomer, he did have enough mathematical skills to take precise enough measurements to track the orbits. One of the large bodies disappeared near the orbit of Jupiter, likely finding an end similar to the Shoemaker Levy comet of 1994. The other chunk, estimated to be about five and a half miles across, seemed to maintain it’s orbit.
“That the beast?” she said as he looked out toward the faint orbit hurtling through space.
“Hard to say.” he said. “It’s made a couple close calls already, but right now, it seems to be far away from hitting us. I think Jupiter slung it out of our way, for now.”
“Did you notice how chilly it is right now?”
“It’s winter,” he said. “It gets cold this time of the year.”
“Have you looked at the hills to the west?”
He looked westward in the moonlight, and noticed that they were shimmering in the eerie light. “Is that snow?”
“Yeah, snow, and we can’t be that high in elevation. I’d estimate those hills are no more than two thousand.”
“Think this is the start of something?” he said. “Or perhaps we’re just seeing a statistical aberration.”
“Actually, as I’ve been running the numbers, I’ve found that we’ve been experiencing a local aberration, and this is more normal! We might even see snow here this winter.”
“Something to do with the volcanoes?”
“A lot to do with the volcanoes,” she said. “High sulfur output reflects sunlight out into space, eventually cooling things. But as things cool off, and plant growth starts decreasing, the carbon dioxide that’s emitted from the volcanoes starts to build up. With less photosynthesizing plants to offset the increase, we get that wonderful set of catchphrases we’re oh so tired of talking about at home…”
“Ah, Greenhouse Effect, Global Warming, Climate Shift, those cute little expressions!”
“Exactly,” she said. “But it’s interesting, how sometimes it seems to happen that way, and sometimes we simply see the cooling…”
“Depends on the nature of the volcanism, and how much is going on in the rest of the world. If we have lots of big open fissures spewing out massive volumes of basaltic lava, we could have eventual warming. If we have a few massive explosive eruptions that send ash and gas high into the air, we’d have the ‘nuclear winter’ effect. There are some volcanoes to the west of us. We can go look.”
“And when is that meteorite going to strike?”
“The one I was looking at?” he said. “That won’t be anywhere near the Earth for at least three hundred years. We won’t be around to worry about it.”
She ran her fingers through her long dark hair. They were nearly ten years into their sojourn. “I was forty three years old when we left,” she said.
“And I was thirty one,” he said. “I am forty now, and you’re fifty two.”
“Yet look at us,” she said. “No new gray hairs, no new creases or wrinkles. Hell, even my tits are still pretty firm.”
“We’ve been living naturally for some time,” he said. “We’re eating better, we don’t have the stress…”
“I think there’s something else,” she said. “I was still, uh…well, you know that nasty little thing women go through every twenty eight days? I haven’t had that once since we left home. I thought maybe it was ‘the change’ but there haven’t been any other changes that normally come along with it.”
“Come to think of it, even the truck has kept it’s polish pretty well, aside from the scratches and dents. You think that the time travel did something to us?”
“Like arrested the process of aging?” she said. “I have a feeling that we’re not going to die here. We might end up getting home after all…”
“In sixty three million years!”
“Well, I said I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last man on earth,” she said. “Then somewhere along the way I did…”
“And I guess you were right! I wasn’t the last man on Earth. I was the FIRST!”
“It’s taking some time, but I’m starting to like you!”
“And a good thing that is,” he replied. “Because if you’re right about your theory, we’ve got sixty three million years together.”
“And imagine, what we get to experience! We’ll see the Chixulub impact, and the climate changes of the Paleocene!” she said. “The evolution of dogs, cats, horses, even MAN!”
“And the Volcanoes, earthquakes, ice ages, meteor impacts….”
“We’ll eventually get to learn who made tools, who discovered agriculture, who built the Pyramids, Stonehenge…” she speculated.
“And we’ll get to live through other marvelous events in history. The Roman dictatorships, the inquisitions, the Renaissance, even worse, the DISCO era!”
“Again, we’ve got sixty three million years for that,” she said. “And I’ve got sixty three million years to steel myself to the thought of seeing you in a leisure suit!”
“Can’t be as bad as either of us in animal skins!”
“May 12, 63,123,568 Before Christian Era, or somewhere around that time…” he wrote. “I’ve been watching that anomaly in the sky, and we ran the numbers. It is going to strike in mid winter in six years. We’re making our arrangements. We found some caverns to the northeast of the broad inland seas and east of the mountains, and we began laying in a large supply of dried roots and tubers and spiced, preserved meat. We’ve spent years of trial and error figuring out how to preserve foods, but I think we’ve figured out the process pretty good. We figure we’ll need two to three years supply. I hope we’re wrong.
“We’ve been storing things in a cave in what will eventually become the Hartz Mountains in Poland. The limestone formations seem perfect for our purposes. It’s interesting what one can do when they find out they have practically all the time in the world. Until then, we’ll just travel about, grabbing anything that looks edible, and preparing it for our lengthy hibernation.
“Right now, we’ve been staying along the western shores of North America, in what will become Placer County California. It is vastly different than what it would become by the twenty first century. I thought it would be interesting to see what my childhood home looked liked. It is a mixed forest of Gingko and Metasequoia, with a few Buckeye and Magnolia like trees. The temperatures and weather are like that closer to parts of western Mexico, only a little more rain. There are no mountains, other than a few remnants of old volcanoes that from the looks of them hadn’t erupted in a few million years. Mostly, the terrain is rolling hills merely a few hundred feet above sea level, with large rivers cutting across them. Most of these low ridges run in a northwest-southeast direction, and the rivers run between them for long stretches before finding gaps that allowed them to continue down toward the sea. These rivers are rather large, as they reach from deep within the continent, as far east as what will later become Utah and Wyoming.
“A low range of somewhat jagged mountains have formed across parts of the future states of Colorado, eastern Wyoming and Montana. I would guess this is one of the phases of the Laramide Orogeny, the process which uplifted part of the future Rocky Mountains. The Sierra Nevada, as well as the ranges and valleys that are characteristic of Nevada and western Utah, have not seen any uplift or mountain building processes yet.
“There aren’t too many dinosaurs hanging around out here at the moment. I only saw one small Deinochysus like creature, and some large piles of dung that were left behind by something large like a brontosaur, but I couldn’t find the brontosaur. Lots of birds, though. Numerous toothed birds, but lots of beaked birds, too, such as parrots, seagulls and duck like birds. The forests are full of the squawking, shrieking and hollering of the numerous bird species. The trend seems to be that the birds like the windward side of most continents, and the remaining dinosaurs like the leeward side of landmasses. We cannot quite figure out why, but that seems to be the trend.
“We are making one more expedition before we hunker down for the great calamity that will strike us. We are going to make our way down the coast and then eastward to what will later become the Yucatan Peninsula. We’ve figured out ways to preserve records and photographs, and we thought it would be interesting to get a set of ‘before and after’ pictures. At least that is where we think it will land. We’ve been wrong about a few things. We might find out there’s more to this than we previously thought.
When they arrived in Mexico, they were greeted by a series of massive squall lines and a tremendous sea surge. The open oceans and slightly warmer temperatures provided ample opportunity for storms to grow rather large and strong.
“I was in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina,” she said.
“Bring back memories?”
“Not quite!” she replied as a gust of wind in excess of two hundred miles an hour blew by. “It’s TEN TIMES WORSE!”
“Remember, we don’t have the advantage of satellites and storm monitors or Doppler Radar. We’re going to be caught a little off guard.”
“Let’s hide inland, and then come down after this blasts through.”
“Sounds like a good plan!” she said. At that, they drove through the thick undergrowth to a location about fifty miles inland. Unfortunately, the hurricane had developed so much strength that landfall had little effect on it. Even fifty miles inland, the storm rivaled any that they had experienced. As Sarah had claimed, she found herself trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and Dr. Johnson found himself stranded in Cabo San Lucas during Hurricane John only a year later. Neither were ready for this.
The wind and rain didn’t just blow over in a day or so like the twenty first century hurricanes. Instead, it lingered for more than five. Why it did so, it was hard to determine. Was the storm really that large, or was it just tightly wound, organized, and thus very slow moving?
The storm, which Dr. Johnson whimsically called ‘Superhurricane Diane Marie’ in honor of a girlfriend that he had gone through a rather ugly ending with shortly before the trip, left total devastation in its wake. Hardly a tree stood along nearly a hundred miles of coastline. As they left, they drew some sketches, took some photographs, and proceeded on the long trek back to the low rolling limestone hills of the region that would someday become southern Poland. Once there, they would make the final preparations.
They sat before the mouth of the cave, looking to the west. As the sun went down, a bright star shone in the northeast. Over the last several weeks, that star seemed to be getting brighter. It also had been making a slow, but ever accelerating, migration westward.
“There she is,” he said. “Don’t even need a telescope to see the edges of the damn thing anymore.”
“And you say it’s going to hit?”
“My own calculations say somewhere in the mid Pacific, but I could be off. Even if I’m only off by less than one percent, Chixalub is still within that parameter.”
“I can’t think of anything else we need to do.”
“The truck is back in the cave, we’ve got plenty of food, and we’ve got access to a water supply. I can’t think of too much else.”
“When that thing hits, it’s going to poison the water supply.”
“The groundwater will be filtered by hundreds of feet of rock before it gets back into the pools in the cave. All the acids and stuff should be out of it by then.”
“And you also said that Brontosaurus liked us, too,” she reminded him. “Just before he pissed on us.”
“We made it this far,” he said. “Nearly five hundred years. I think we’ll make it another sixty three million.”
She went into the cave, and returned with two cheap, haphazardly repaired chaise lounge chairs.
“I repaired these with the vines I found down in Arizona, or wherever that was,” she said. “Thought it would be handy for a moment like this.”
The irony struck him. “I can’t believe I spent eight years in college for this! The opportunity to sit down in a lawn chair and wait for the world to end!”
They sat and watched the skies, and as they did, the bright spot in the sky became brighter and brighter. It’s edges showed more irregular, and it was obvious it was not a star. It was a giant potato shaped piece of rock about five miles long and two and a half miles wide.
Over the next several evenings, the white rock grew closer, then one night, it shone bright from directly overhead. He looked at his sheet of calculations. That was the night. They would sit out on their lawn chairs until that moment, then find refuge in the cave they had so carefully prepared.
“We won’t hear it,” he said. “But we’ll see a bright flash over the horizon. Then we’ll have the earthquakes and the re-entry of all the big crap that gets kicked up.”
“It’ll be a hell of a fireworks show!” she said.
“It’ll be Hell on Earth, quite literally.” he said.
She took his hand and led him toward a trail.
“Last walk through the woods?” she said.
“Last walk through these woods, at least,” he said.
“These creatures,” she said. “Like the Triceratops. That beast was my favorite when I was in school.”
“I liked Ankly,” he said.
“We got to see these beasts,” she said. “We’ve learned so much about them. They’ve become parts of our lives. After tonight, they’ll be gone.”
“Actually, it will take weeks before they’re all gone,” he said. “After the forest fires and the acid rain, they’ll finally lose. First the herbivores, then the remaining predators. It will not be pleasant for them.”
In the moonlight they watched a small band of brontosaurs wander across an open fern covered meadow. They munched on the treetops around the side of the clearing, and a couple of them took moments from their munching to frolic and play with one another.
“Do you think they have any idea what’s about to happen to them?”
“It’s probably best that way.”
Soon, the sun went down, and night fell. The bright large object slowly coursed its way west and slightly southward.
As it grew larger and closer, sparks began to fly off of it as it struck the higher reaches of the atmosphere. As it streaked toward the southern horizon, another large chunk flew off of it and started to course westward. Both the large chunks sped across the sky, leaving an orange glow in their trace. Smaller sparks flew off, most of them dissipating as they strayed from the larger masses, but the large pieces soon were out of sight as they both arced over the horizon.
A few moments later, there was a large orange flash emitting from the distance horizon. It grew brighter and brighter, and soon, the whole entire southern sky was a bright wash of orange and red. Several small white hot objects began coursing through the skies, some of them streaking overhead. As the entire sky turned orange, it became warm, then unbelievably hot.
“I think it’s time to go in,” she said as she picked up the items she was sitting on and ran into the cave.
The ground began to tremble, and Dr. Johnson picked up his chair and notebook. “I think we can put that debate to rest.”
“Let’s just hope we’re doing the right thing.”
“Our ancestors hid underground during this time, I think,” he said. “This ought to be the safest place in town.”
They ran as fast as they could into the depth of the cave. Several times the trembling earth knocked them to their feet, but they managed to find safety into the chamber they had so diligently stocked and reinforced.
Larger chunks of rock, some from the meteors, and some from the debris kicked skyward from the impact, began to re-enter the atmosphere and strike the ground. They struck and stripped forests, they struck animals, and some even started fires. Dust and ash belched into the air, not only from Chixulub, but from a smaller impact farther out in the Pacific, about half way out to where the Hawaiian Islands would eventually form. The heat from the impact and from the exposed molten magma caused the oxygen and nitrogen in the air to react with the steam from the superheated seawater, and a caustic rain of Nitric Acid began to spread out from a ring-shaped area about a thousand miles from the impact, eventually spreading into one mega storm that covered virtually every inch of the planet. The entire world would be nothing more than fire and caustic rain for several weeks.
The Cretaceous Period ended at 1:47 a.m. on January 12, 63,123,566 B.C.E…
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