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The story itself back on page 14 offered more vivid writing. “First an explosion as powerful as thousands of megatons of TNT rained meteorites down on North America,” began reporter Robert Mitchum. “Then forest fires broke out across the continent, sending up a thick layer of soot and dust that blocked out the sun. A sudden ice age ensued, and some of the Earth’s largest animals went extinct in a blink of geological time.” Mitchum explained that the microscopic nanodiamonds had been found across North America “in a 13,000-year-old layer of rich sedimentary soil called a ‘black mat.’ Beneath the layer with the nanodiamonds, fossils of the animals are abundant. After that layer, they disappear…”
Mitchum said the scientists believe the meteorite shower was triggered by a comet that “exploded above the planet’s surface.” The more sober-sided Times story by science writer Kenneth Chang didn’t make a single mention of comets. Chang simply wrote that about 12,900 years ago the Earth experienced an “abrupt cooling” that some scientists now say “may have been caused by one or more meteors that slammed into North America.”
