The Biotic Response of Marine Macro-invertebrates to the Manson Impact Event David A. Burch, Department of Geology, University of South Florida Introduction Large extraterrestrial objects impacting the Earth's surface would cause considerable environmental and ecological disruption. The magnitude of disturbance required to produce an extinction event has yet to be determined.
Extinction events can occur by a variety of mechanisms.
Controversy over which mechanisms are more likely to have caused the Phanerozoic mass extinctions rages on. Extraterrestrial forced extinctions gained attention in the geologic community when Alvarez et al. The MIS will allow a smaller event to be thoroughly analyzed. If the Manson event caused any significant ecological or biological disturbances this is surely reflected in the adjacent, contemporaneous deposits of the CWIS basin. A high-resolution survey of the macroinvertebrate fauna above and below the impact boundary will expose any biologic or ecologic perturbations caused by the impact.