Northern Crater Shows Prehistoric Deep Impact

Alaska Science Forum ^ | July 7, 1998 | Ned Rozell

[SunkenCiv]

To the rhinos and crocodiles of the far north, the day was like any other. They ate, swam and napped, unaware a celestial body was headed their way at 60,000 miles per hour. Suddenly, a wayward comet screamed into the atmosphere, struck Earth and created a bowl a mile deep and 15 miles in diameter.

[SunkenCiv]

I'll ping the list when I get home.

Mars On Earth: Arctic Crater Reveals Martian Secrets (pt 2)

Haughton Crater is the remaining scar from a high-speed collision between Earth and some heavy object from space about 23 million years ago. The comet or asteroid that created the crater was perhaps more than a mile (up to 2 kilometers) across and slammed into the forest that existed on Devon Island. Everything was annihilated for scores of miles in all directions. The impact churned up rock from more than a mile below the surface, vaporizing much of it. It's estimated that between 70 and 100 billion tons of rock was excavated from the crater in the moments just after the impact. While clouds of dust and gas filled the air, rock rained down from the sky, much of it in the form of what geologists now call breccia, which simply means "broken up." Scattered within the breccia are pieces of a rock called gneiss that normally is dark and dense. In Haughton Crater breccia, the "shocked gneiss" resembles pumice stone -- it's ash-white, porous and very lightweight.

Voices of the Rocks
by Robert Schoch
and Robert Aquinas McNally
(pp 1-3)
other supplier

"Yet, as it will, life returned to this site of complete devastation... The world those fossils described, the one that flourished on the order of 20 million years ago, during the early Miocene epoch, was strikingly different from today's Arctic... Devon Island was covered with a forest of birch trees and conifers, a landscape that one now finds about 2,000 miles to the south, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Maine. Now-extinct forms of rhinoceros and mouse deer browsed among the trees; shrews and pika-like relatives of modern rabbits darted through the shadows; and freshwater fish swam the lakes and streams...

"Even farther back, on the order of 45 to 65 million years ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, the fossil record shows Devon Island to have been still more profoundly different. Back then, what is now the Arctic was a region of swampy lowlands, slow-moving rivers, and towering forests of dawn redwood, kadsura, and ancestral forms of hickory, elm, birch, sycamore, and maple. Primitive fishes, crocodiles, salamanders, newts, and turtles inhabited the rivers and marshes, while the forests and meadows supported flying lemurs, early primates, forerunners of today's cats and dogs, and ancestors of the rhinos, tapirs, and horses."

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[SunkenCiv]

[pat travers] Boom boom, what is it? [crowd] out go the lights!

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[Question_Assumptions]

What the global warming people don't say is that a lot of these sites were also above the arctic circle millions of years ago, too, yet warm-weather creatures lived there.

[SunkenCiv]

Well, the areas had warmer climates anyway. :')

[Valin]

It's all George Bush's fault!

[SunkenCiv]

:') Well, he made the final decision, but it was still all Karl Rove's idea. Oh, and I think Drudge was involved in some way.

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 08/28/2004. Updated Link.

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