One feature of geology that seems to have become entrenched in recent years is the idea that during the Cretaceous era global warming was rampant. Initially, this was theorised in order to explain trees growing on Ellesmere Island and other unlikely places where it is dark for almost six months of the year. It also explained the apparent semi tropical habitat that appears to have prevailed in southern Britain, and so on. At http://phys.org/print385836787.html … this is expanded to inlcude palms growing in Canada and lily pads within the Arctic Circle etc. Once the idea of runaway global warming by increased levels of co2 took hold in the latter stages of the 20th century this idea was quickly grabbed and used to explain the apparent warmth in what is now the coldest parts of the northern hemisphere. It's a peculiar jump to a conclusion as research appears to be largely restricted to Europe and N America (and the Caribbean and North Atlantic). Do we know it it was warm as toast in other parts of the world – or is this based on an assumption that it must be (but we don't want to look too closely).
At the link above they seem to be saying that Cretaceous global warming depleted the oceans of vital nutrients associated with the food chain. Sediment cores from a drilling project off the coast of Venezeulia found a substantial shift around 94 million years ago with various types of bacteia and algae affecting as they display evidence of change. The article then becomes mixed up with modern global warming issues (likening the drop in nutrients to what we might expect in the near future). I suppose this is all part of the funding agreement – but we can't be sure of that. We do know they didn't have SUVs back in those days and as far as anybody knows the dinosaurs didn't burn fossil fuels – but there was runaway global warming (if you are prepared to take it all at face value).
The date is interesting, some 30 million years prior to the asteroid strike that brought the Cretaceous to an end. This may well imply something wrong with Cretaceous geochronology (but only if you are of a catastrophist persuasion). Does the geochronology require telescoping as the dates are achieved by assuming it takes X years to lay down a particular layer or layers of sediment? Was the planktonic life forms within the chalk formations laid down more quickly than dreamed of in the mainstream gradualist model. Is this an example of sedimentary layers being laid down rapidly but assumed to have been laid down irnordinately slowly? If so that would bring a host of sedimentary oddities into line with the asteroid strike – and laid down as a result of the asteroid strike. It is of course the fact that layers of sediment are not dated contemporary with the asteroid strike that allows some geologists to still question whether the asteroid brought the era of the dinosaurs to an end. The big problem for mainstream is that they know the dinosaur age was lengthy and in all probability lasted a very long time – the rate of evolution of the various dinosaurs is one clue, and the emergence of plants with flowers and seeds is another, quite apart from other species such as the mammals and the birds. They did not occur in the twinkle of an eyelid – it must have involved a considerable amount of time. However, by dating the sediments over very long periods of time they provide the necessary space for evolving species but have they closed the barn door on what could be a much more interesting scenario, a catastrophic event of giant proportions (and the asteroid strike theory has a lot of geologists onboard) that has actually been recorded in the geological record (the various layers of sediments laid down around 65 million years ago) but which is lost to mainstream by insisting that a geological record is being laid down all the time – with no breaks. Is geology being laid down at the present? You'd be hard pressed to discover it. The odd flood event, or earthquake, the normal small scale catastrophic event, may have been preserved – but in the big picture that does not seem to be true. A layer cake of the Holocene would be difficult to find – apart from ocean sediments, or lake sediments. It is significant that the study here used ocean bottom sediments but that is qualified by the fact that geochronology is used to date the sediments.
It seems that this is another case of a consensus with holes in it. They may well be right but if they have closed their minds to the possibility of being wrong should we meekly accept the mainstream model?