"Evolution" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

CHAPTER 3 The Devil’s Tail North America. Circa 65 million years before present.

I

Once interplanetary impacts had been constructive, a force for good.

Earth had formed close to the brightening sun. Water and other volatiles had quickly boiled away, leaving the young world an empty theater of rock. But the comets, falling in from the outer system, delivered substances that had coalesced in that cooler region: especially the water that would fill Earth’s oceans, and compounds of carbon, whose chain-based chemistry would lie at the heart of all life. Earth settled down to a long chemical age in which complex organic molecules were manufactured in the mindless churning of the new oceans. It was a long prelude to life. It would not have come about without the comets.

But now the time of the impacts was done, so it seemed. In the new solar system, the remaining planets and moons followed nearly circular orbits, like a vast piece of clockwork. Any objects following more disorderly paths had mostly been removed.

Mostly.

The thing that now came out of the dark, its surface of dirty slush sputtering in the sun’s heat, was like a memory of Earth’s traumatic formation.

Or a bad dream.

In human times, the Yucatan Peninsula was a tongue of land that pushed north out of Mexico into the gulf. On the peninsula’s northern coast there was a small fishing harbor called Puerto Chicxulub (Chic-shoe-lube). It was an unprepossessing place, a limestone plain littered with sinkholes and freshwater springs, agave plantations, and brush.

Sixty-five million years before that, in the moist age of the dinosaurs, this place was ocean floor. The plains of the Gulf of Mexico were flooded up to the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The shallow Yucatan Peninsula itself lay under nearly a hundred meters of water. The sediments that would later form Cuba and Haiti were part of the deep seafloor, yet to be lifted by fault movements to the surface.

In an age dominated by warm shallow seas, drowned Chicxulub was an unremarkable place. But it was here that a world would end.

Chicxulub is a Mayan word, an ancient word coined by a lost people. Later, when the Mayans were gone, nobody would know for sure how it translated. Local legend said it meant the Devil’s Tail.

In its last moments the comet flew in from the southeast, passing over the Atlantic and South America.