Information circulated on the cambridge-conference network is for scholarly use only. The attached text may not be reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. Other quotes come from Mike Baillie, Mike Rampino, Donald Yeomans, and Robert Shoch. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world. Some researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with comets or fragments of comets like the one that broke apart and smashed spectacularly into Jupiter five years ago this summer. The impacts, yielding many megatons of explosive energy, produced vast clouds of smoke and dust that circled the globe for years, dimming the sun, driving down temperatures and sowing hunger, disease and death. Trees from California to Ireland to Siberia stopped growing.