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The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
What a crock, if space is really so full of small comets why don't we see them hit the moon?
Comment on the paper 'On the influx of small comets into the earth's upper atmosphere'Abstract: The possibility that comets containing up to 100 tons of ice encounter the earth's atmosphere at a rate of one every 20 min is discussed. Cometary 'hail storms' were proposed to explain observed regular transient decreases in the atmospheric UV dayglow intensity. The decreases take the form of dark 'holes' up to 50 km across. The probability that clouds of objects assumed to be as dark as the nucleus of Comet Halley between the earth and moon would be detectable by ground-based electrooptical deep space telescopes is considered. Conflicting projections of the number of objects which would be detected per hour are examined. High correlations are noted between cometary passages (Comets Encke, Tuttle, Tempel) and intervals of meteor showers (Taurids, Leonids, Geminis, etc.). The holes, however, are not correlated or coincident with the showers. It is suggested that dedicated searches for the unclassified dark objects be carried out in November, when cometary fluxes are high.
Steven Soter
Geophysical Research Letters
vol. 14, Feb. 1987, p. 162, 163;
Reply, p. 164-167.
Sources of Terrestrial and Martian WaterAbstract: There is no agreement on the origin of water on Earth and Mars. A number of sources have been proposed but the pieces of this puzzle do not currently fit into a coherent picture. We list various geochemical measurements that can serve as discriminators and we use them to examine the principal proposed mechanisms for delivery of terrestrial and Martian water. Important new developments have occurred in our understanding of the presence of water during early and late stages of Earth's formation. It has long been thought that the region of the solar nebula where Earth formed was too dry for hydrous mineral phases to be stable and form a "wet" Earth, and that water was delivered by impacts of asteroids and/or comets with Earth after it formed. However, several recent measurements support the existence of water oceans on Earth shortly after its formation, as early as 4.3 to 4.4 x 10^9 years ago. The source or sources of this early water are not obvious at this time. Two new mechanisms proposed for the formation of a wet early Earth are adsorption of nebular gas onto fractal dust grains in Earth's formation region and migration of hydrated silicates from the outer asteroid belt region of the solar nebula. On the other hand, late stage delivery of significant quantities of water from asteroidal and cometary sources appears less likely that previously thought. Isotopic and molecular ratio considerations do not favor asteroids or comets as the main contributors to what is commonly termed the "late veneer" in Earth's formation. There are two important caveats to this last statement. First, our measurement of the composition of comets and asteroids may not be representative of their bulk atomic, isotopic and molecular composition. Second, comets and asteroids currently sampled spectroscopically and by meteorites may be unlike those falling to Earth during its formation. Independent of the role comets and asteroids may have played in the delivery of water, they appear to have been the principal source of organic compounds once the Earth's crust had solidified.
Humberto Campins
Michael J. Drake
January 30, 2006
Clandestine comets found in main asteroid belt - Earth oceans origin
newscientist space | 23 March 2006
Posted on 03/24/2006 5:26:05 AM EST by S0122017
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1602203/posts
Scientist Says Ice Meteors a Sign of Climate Change (Environut alert)
Reuters (Yahoo) | Fri Sep 27, 9:54 AM ET | Emma Ross-Thomas
Posted on 09/27/2002 12:06:27 PM EDT by narby
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/758461/posts
UFO cloud wakes seen by NASA satellite
Eoenquirer
Posted on 03/22/2007 10:12:41 PM EDT by djf
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1805355/posts
Quibble -- military surveillance satellites do see them, or at least the results of their impacts.Icy minicomets not so dead!J.J. Olivero and his colleagues at Penn State have been monitoring the sky with a microwave radiometer in their search for emissions from high-altitude gases. During more than 500 days of observations, they detected 111 sudden bursts of water vapor. Olivero et al suggest that these bursts occur when small, icy comets vaporize at very high altitudes. These minicomets are of the same size (about 100 tons) and frequency (20 per minute over the whole atmosphere) as those predicted by L.A. Frank. Frank's icy comets have been received with about as much warmth as "cold fusion." One reason for the unpopularity of icy comets is that they would have provided sufficient water to fill the ocean basins, thus undermining the accepted view that our oceans derived from outgassed water vapor from deep within the earth... the minicomets do have some counts registered against them: (1) The effects of all the purported water vapor on the ionosphere should be easily detected but they are not; (2) Seismometers emplaced on the moon have not detected their impacts there; and (3) Military surveillance satellites have not seen these housesized objects.
by William R. Corliss
Science Frontiers
No. 72: Nov-Dec 1990