Artist's conception
Posted on 01/01/2008 3:02:13 PM PST by SunkenCiv
One of the biggest cosmic dust storms of the past 80 million years left a blanket of material on Earth after an asteroid in space broke apart, researchers said today. The conclusion is based on evidence in ocean sediments, which computer models have tied to an observed bevy of asteroid siblings still roaming the solar system... The drama took place 8.2 million years ago. That much has been reasoned before. The event would have created vast amounts of dust, some of which would have been scooped up by our planet... The dust rich in helium 3 spiked about 8.2 million years ago and gradually decreased over the course of 1.5 million years, the data shows. "The helium 3 spike found in these sediments is the smoking gun that something quite dramatic happened to the interplanetary dust population 8.2 million years ago," said Caltech geochemist Ken Farley. "It's one of the biggest dust events of the last 80 million years." ...Farley and his colleagues studied sediment from beneath the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, showing that the same event was recorded at two widely separated locations. The long-gone large asteroid has been previously dubbed Veritas.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Artist's conception
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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
Who Knew!!!!!!!!!!!
:-)
Happy New Year!
Man, that is ONE HUGE ROCK!
All it is is dust in the wind. ;’)
Just received this book for Christmas. Can’t wait to read it. Already see that I will have to get back to some of the Carolina Bay threads I have seen before.
Ha! We’ve got ya now!!!! ;’) ;’) ;’)
I hope the authors have a sequel regarding the two earlier impact wave events, but it will no doubt take a while, particularly if they continue to concentrate on the Pleistocene megafauna extinction.
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