The stone struck the shallow sea at Chicxulub
At twenty kilometers per second—the sum
Of its cosmic velocity—and the pub-
Lication of its energy was the drum
Of ten billion nuclear weapons
Detonated in a single point
In a single second—and the reckoning
Of the physics at the impact's joint
Was absolute:
The stone vaporized—
Not broke, not shattered—vaporized, and with it
The limestone seafloor was likewise
Atomized, and the trillion-ton remit
Of debris—rock, water, the calcium
Carbonate of the ancient reef—went up:
Up through the atmosphere's vacuum-
Punched hole, up past the stratosphere's cup,
Up into space—and from space, looked down:
A white-hot column of ejecta rising
From the planet's wound, a luminous crown
Of debris beyond any theorizing
That the Cretaceous world could have imagined.
The shock wave traveled through the earth
At the speed of sound in stone—the imagined
And the real converging—and the girth
Of the planet rang like a bell: magnitude-eleven
Earthquake, the largest seismic event
Since the formation of the earth, the heaven
And the ground shaking as the planet's lament
For its own wounded surface propagated
Through every rock and every mantle layer.
The tsunami followed: waves as rated
By the models at three hundred meters—a prayer
Of water that swept across the Gulf
And the Atlantic's western shore—the engulf
Of every coastal ecosystem, the gulf
Between the living and the dead—the wolf
Of water consuming everything.
And then—
The ejecta fell. The debris that had risen
Into space came down again, and when
It struck the upper atmosphere—the prison
Of the air—the friction heated every grain
To incandescence: the sky caught fire.
Not metaphor: the literal rain
Of white-hot glass beads from the pyre
Of the impact heated the atmosphere
To broiling—the forests caught fire not
From any spreading flame but from the sheer
Radiant heat of the sky's red-hot
Ceiling of returning debris—global
Firestorms, every forest on the planet
Burning simultaneously, the immobile
And the fleeing alike consumed—the granite
And the living wood equally submitted
To the thermal pulse of the sky on fire.
The soot rose. And the soot committed
The second murder: the pyre
Of every forest on the planet sent
A billion tons of carbon particulate
Into the stratosphere—and there it went
Into the permanent night of the ultimate
Impact winter: the sun blocked
For months, then years—the photosynthesis
That fed the world's food-chains was locked
Out of the equation—the synthesis
Of plant and sunlight ceased, and the cascade
Of starvation began:
First the plants died
In the darkness. Then the herbivores, who made
Their living on the plants. Then the pride
Of the predators, who made their living
On the herbivores. The food web collapsed
From the bottom up—the base's giving
Cut off, the entire pyramid relapsed
Into nothing.
Tyrannos starved.
Ceratops starved. Hadros starved.
Sauropos' last giants, who had carved
A hundred million years of living—starved.
Mosas in the ocean, where the plankton
Died in the darkness, and the fish that ate
The plankton died, and the mosasaur's plankton-
Fed food web collapsed—Mosas met his fate
In the dark and starving sea.
Plesios—
The patient plesiosaur, who had swum
For a hundred and thirty million years—the flows
Of the Mesozoic ocean gave her no welcome
In the impact winter's starving dark.
Pteros—the sky giant, Quetzal and his kin—
The last of the pterosaurs found no park
Of thermal to ride, no fish, no protein
In the poisoned and the darkened world.
The ammonites, who had sailed the ocean
Since the Devonian—their shells were hurled
To the sediment floor, the final motion
Of a lineage four hundred million years old.
Seventy-five percent of all species died.
Every land animal larger than a dog was tolled
Into the fossil record's certified
And permanent account of the destroyed.
This is Good Mesozoic Friday:
The death of the Mesozoic world, the void
That the asteroid opened in the midday
Of the planet's greatest complexity—
Not villainy, not error, not the wrong
Decision—only the cosmic perplexity
Of a universe that does not belong
To any of its creatures, and the stone
That fell without intent upon a world
That had done nothing wrong—the bone
Of the innocent, the flag unfurled
Of every lineage that had earned its place
Through a hundred million years of evolution
Brought to nothing by the emptied space
Between the orbits—no absolution,
No justice, no reason—only the rock
And the planet, and the mathematics
Of the crossing orbits, and the shock
Of a world that ends in aerodynamics
And the physics of the unintended.
Let us mourn the Mesozoic dead—
For the dying was not earned or recommended
But only the falling of the stone, and the thread
Of a hundred million years of living—cut
In a single second by a thoughtless sky.