Hurricane From Hell

Most researchers believe a large asteroid or comet smacked into Earth around 65 million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs and three- quarters of the other species. They even know where ground zero was: the northern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where a large sediment-filled crater straddles the land and sea. What nobody is sure of, however, is how such an impact might have killed so widely. The conventional wisdom is that the impact--or volcanic eruptions triggered by the impact--launched a global pall of dust and gases that blocked out the sun or wiped out the ozone layer or both. But no one, says atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel of MIT, has been able to explain exactly how all that stuff got up into the stratosphere--10 to 35 miles above the surface--which it would have to do if it were to spread all over the planet. Now Emanuel and a team of colleagues think they’ve found the answer. It’s still purely hypothetical, and that is fortunate. A hypercane, as they call their creation, would be a hurricane we’d never want to see.