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The argument over what killed the dinosaurs has raged for 25 years, and has polarised into two opposing camps, a meteorite impact, or a prolonged bout of mega-volcanism called a continental flood basalt. But now a team from Geomar, an earth sciences institute at Kiel University in Germany, has come up with a completely new type of geological catastrophe to explain the death of the dinosaurs, as well as three previous mass extinctions. If they are right the culprit was neither a meteorite nor a flood basalt, but a colossal underground explosion called a Verneshot. As yet the idea is in its infancy. But the Verneshot hypothesis has one big advantage over its rivals. It explains a mystery that haunts the debate over mass extinctions, why the extinctions always seem to coincide with both continental flood basalts and meteorite impacts when the odds of these happening simultaneously are vanishingly slim.

Presents findings of a study conducted by U.S. researchers on the possibility that gigantic meteorites could have crashed through the Earth's crust without leaving any signs of a crater. Correlation of the timing of asteroid impacts with volcanos; Reference to a report on the topic by Dallas Abbott and Ann Isley published in the periodical 'Earth and Planetary Science Letters,' vol. 205.

This article presents information related to the belief that Mars's magnetism died out nearly four billion years ago. This belief could be wrong. If a study of a meteorite crater in South Africa is anything to go by, the Red Planet may have been magnetically active long after that. Measurements taken by the Mars Global Surveyor satellite have shown that the massive Hellas and Argyre craters are only weakly magnetic. Scientists took this to mean that Mars's magnetism was already weak when meteorites struck to form the craters four billion years ago. This conclusion was based on the idea that if the magnetic field was weak to being with, shock waves from large meteorite impacts could disrupt the field enough to demagnetize the rocks in the crater.