The Extinction Code Read Free

that the correspondence had come from out east, maybe one of the prestigious halls of academia in New York City, but he hadn’t had the time to investigate and track down his mysterious benefactor due to a single line in the letter:
    It’s exposed, and will not survive long the harsh elements of Hell Creek…
    The crumbling rock faces gave way to slopes, where scattered clumps of hardy grass clung to life amid the scorching rock faces. Channing surveyed the strata around him, colorful stripes across the hills that denoted the passing of history before their very eyes.
    ‘Why are there lines all across the hills?’
    Weisler’s voice sounded stark in the silence, louder and perhaps a touch more irritating than Channing would have liked. Why the author of the letter, having wanted nothing to do with whatever he had found out here, would then request a media man to assist Channing in his search made no sense whatsoever. The newspapers rarely managed to record anything accurate, their methods diametrically opposed to the careful accumulation of data used by science to ascertain truth before revealing it to the world.
    ‘The lines are sedimentary strata,’ Channing explained patiently. ‘Here in Hell Creek, erosion of softer rock by rivers and wind exposes hillsides formed from other, harder rocks and the strata they contain, laid down over millions of years.’
    Weisler considered this for a few moments as they walked. ‘So it’s a record.’
    ‘Yes, it’s a record of geological time, of what happened here over huge periods, like the growth rings in a tree. Different weather, different events, all of them leave a record in the rocks for us to study.’
    ‘And you’re the guy that studies the rocks, right?’ Weisler said, apparently pleased with himself.
    ‘No,’ Channing replied with a quiet joy at the media man’s error. ‘I’m the guy that studies what we find buried in those rocks.’
    Channing reached a section of the hillside slope that he recognized and he slowed and crouched alongside a steep cliff face, strips of color clearly visible even to the layman’s eyes. Although not a geologist by training, Channing’s work involved understanding precisely what he was looking at in order to locate what he was seeking.
    ‘We need to go a little deeper,’ he said.
    Weisler wiped sweat from his brow and squinted down into the valley. ‘Damn me, it’s like an oven here. How do you know you need to go deeper?’
    Channing pointed at a thin layer in the rocks. ‘Because of this.’
    The layer was an inch or so thick, light pink or white, and lay beneath another one about a half inch thick and dark gray in color.
    ‘What is it?’ Weisler asked as he crouched alongside Channing.
    ‘The K–T Boundary,’ Channing replied, ‘the division between the Cretaceous and Paleogene period. This boundary bed marks a bolide impactor’s arrival on Earth.’
    ‘A what now?’
    ‘A massive asteroid impact,’ Channing went on. ‘See the dark layer above it? That’s shocked quartz and iridium, caused by rock being super–heated and compressed. That fell after the layer below it, which was formed by acid rain falling on the earth after the impact as the chemicals churned up from inside the earth hit the atmosphere and poisoned it.’
    Weisler stared at the rocks in amazement. ‘You can tell all of that from an inch and a half of rocks?’
    ‘It’s been studied for decades,’ Channing replied. ‘See the few inches of banding above the K–T boundary? That’s where we find what we call the “fern spike”, huge numbers of fossilized ferns. Such plants are usually the ones to grow first in the wake of forest fires, when the rest of the landscape has been decimated.’
    Channing could almost hear the media man’s mind turning over as he looked at the barren landscape around them.
    ‘And this happened here, turned this land to stone like this?’
    ‘No,’ Channing replied. ‘It happened on the Mexican