Those were the days

Sixty-six million years ago a rock the size of Mount Everest collided with planet Earth. It was The Momentous Event of Earth's entire history. Spectacular is not the word. It must have been far greater than that for something watching from outer space.

Catastrophic, apocalyptic, cataclysmic, enormously devastating, I am reaching for mere words that are, somehow, still not enough to describe what happened. After millions of years of growth (to use a modern concept that we use to justify carbon emissions), it was all reset to Go, in a single day. Well almost back to Go, but not entirely, after all, here we are. Like the philosophical tree falling in the forest, the question once was - did it really happen? The witnesses are the rocks around us. We weren't there but they were; before they were rocks.

Thanks to David Attenborough and an equally, if not more charismatic American, by the name of Robert, we have been irretrievably enlightened. It absolutely did happen and Robert has found the evidence sealed in fossilized rock, from that very day. Those last hours when an evolutionary chapter, the Mesozoic Era, spanning 160 million years, came to a dramatic and devastating end.

God would have probably come to mind if any of us had been there. A mighty, all-powerful, furious God. Our minds, like the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, are inclined to take it personally when we see something as awesome and unrelentingly powerful as Nature, happening - Big Time. The dinosaurs were big. At the time, some of them were enormous. They had spent the last part of the Mesozoic period, the Cretaceous era of some seventy-nine million years, growing in size until they had reached mind-boggling proportions. I have tried to imagine them on that day. It's difficult not to think of them collectively, as they shared the same fate. Avian dinosaurs, however, survived and their descendants are abundant in all shapes, sizes, and sometimes brilliant colours. Possibly the most numerous being the domestic chicken, by the design of mankind and our huge appetite for finger lickin chicken.

There is a movie out, recently, called Don't look Up. It is a modern-day version of the same unlikely event, reoccurring. The difference here is that we humans can predict, but still not prevent, it from happening. I hope that hasn't spoiled the movie for you if you were planning to watch it. As the impending disaster becomes more imminent the lead role group of humans decides the best thing they can do is to accept the inevitable and sit down to dinner, as the last hours tick away. After having spent most of the movie trying to persuade the denialists that it was really going to happen. There is possibly a parallel in the present day, where we perhaps still have a little more time on our hands.

Back then, there was no warning, The Rock streaked towards the Southern Passage (the sea space between what was to become North and South America - now the Gulf of Mexico) at twenty times the speed of a bullet.

The fact that Robert has stumbled upon a scene of the consequences of that impact, frozen in rock, is fascinating. His skill and dedication are not to be underrated. He has spent 10 years in a remote part of Dakota, painstakingly working his way through sand and rock. Now he has his eureka moment, he has discovered a log jam mass death layer of fish and other creatures including a turtle and an entire leg belonging to a Thesilasaur, a relatively small plant-eating dinosaur. He has also discovered the fossilized egg of an about-to-hatch Pterosaur, All these creatures died on a river sandbank, that was obliterated by a wave of water that came rushing up the river. Then everything was covered in mud and that moment in time was preserved while sixty-six million years went by.

The amount of detail he is able to uncover is incredible, right down to finding tiny molten droplets of what were essentially molten particles of the Rock in the fishes' gills. This molten rain came from the initial explosion that sent vapourised rock into the sky, which then rained down again. The fact that this "rain" reached the river before the wave of water, proved that the wave that decimated the sandbank was not a tidal wave from the actual meteor, but one caused by seismic vibration as the mountain of rock struck the Earth's crust.

That's not to say there weren't gigantic tidal waves too. Followed by darkness, as the sun was obliterated by sulphurous dust, which lasted ten years, and a nuclear winter. The survivors were small and mostly underground or in the sea. Amongst the sea-dwelling survivors were early turtles. The truly gigantic dinosaurs that had dominated the land masses and the oceans of the planet died of starvation or died much faster if they were closer to the explosion, the equivalent of 100 million atomic bombs. Now that is a Big Bang!

Getting back to us, which is where the conversation invariably goes, small furry mammals that lived in burrows underground are where our lineage is to be traced. With the sudden exit of the Big Players, there was an evolutionary twist in our future fortunes. From that devastating moment to now we have come a mighty long way. However, existentially nothing has changed much. We, and all the other creatures on Earth, are still busy living to survive because that's the nature of nature. That's not going to change anytime soon, although, in theory, we are working on it. A good example of this is the recent about-turn in Europe where coal-fired power stations are firing up again.

My intention is not to get into a climate change debate, but rather to marvel at Big Nature and to understand that we are at the mercy of its bad, At the moment, it's generally good. When it's hot, it's been hotter; when it's cold, it's been a lot colder. We are in the proverbial goldilocks moment and let's celebrate that while it lasts.

This idea was brought home to me recently, quite literally. The fact that Big Nature, may at anytime turn on the heat, so to speak.

A bolt of lightning streaks from a stormy, grey sky, and suddenly everything is quite different. Within 15 minutes the tree house and everything in it are gone.

Fortunately, unlike the dinosaurs, we are not at home.