Posted on 09/05/2005 9:36:19 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
What a powerful telescope had picked up as it stretched towards the night sky over Antarctica was the trail of dust left in the wake of the death of an asteroid... "What he didn't know at the time was that seven hours earlier an asteroid had crashed to Earth in another part of Antarctica, about 1500 kms west of Davis. The closest it got to human habitation was around 900 kms west of Japan's Syowa station," Dr Klekociuk said... Dr Klekociuk said that it was thought that the asteroid had come from what is known as the Aten group somewhere between Venus and Earth, ranging anywhere up to 46 million kms from the sun. Measuring roughly 10 metres it is the biggest body to enter Earth's atmosphere in the past decade. Its travel time from entering Earth's atmosphere 75 kms up until it landed? Just five seconds. Scientists believe that the asteroid's original size was close to that of a small house weighing a thousand tonnes and that if it had not broken up on entry into the atmosphere its effect on impact would have been that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. "The size of the dust cloud in the stratosphere was 200 kms by 75 kms. Had a cloud that size passed over the sun the light would have dimmed by around 20 per cent.
(Excerpt) Read more at rednova.com ...
A catastrophism ping.
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Giant asteroid rocked Antarctica
Near Earth Object Information Centre | 8/20/2004 | staff
Posted on 10/17/2004 9:26:51 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1248406/posts
The Eltanin Impact Crater
Geological Society of America | October 27-30, 2002
Christy A. Glatz, Dallas H. Abbott, and Alice A. Nunes
Posted on 10/17/2004 9:46:13 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1248414/posts
Forests Frozen In Time
Science Frontiers (#51) | May-Jun 1987 | William R. Corliss
Posted on 01/15/2005 3:53:29 PM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1321587/posts
Antarctica 'Lost World' Found
CNN | 08/14/2005
Posted on 08/15/2005 1:01:20 PM PDT by TerP26
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1463873/posts
Yikes! And none of the near Earth orbiting detection projects even knew it was there!
related:
Small Comets and Our Origins
University of Iowa | circa 1999 | Louis A. Frank
Posted on 10/19/2004 11:13:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1250694/posts
An Argument for the Cometary Origin of the Biosphere
American Scientist | September-October 2001 | Armand H. Delsemme
Posted on 09/06/2004 8:16:38 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1208497/posts
A Celestial Collision
Alaska Science Forum | February 10, 1983 | Larry Gedney
Posted on 09/15/2004 9:04:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1216757/posts?page=3#3
The Peekskill Fireball (October 9, 1992)
High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center | since 1992 | StarChild
Posted on 10/03/2004 8:46:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1234499/posts
The Big Splash:
A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life,
the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans,
the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future of the Earth Itself
by Louis A. Frank
with Patrick Huyghe
Sigwarth and I analyzed over 10,000 images and learned a good deal about the black spots in the process. Our interpretation of the events continued to involve meteor impacts into Earth's upper atmosphere.By counting the spots in our images we were able to estimate the rate at which these objects appeared. This was the simplest measurement to do. We saw ten holes per minute on the daylight side of Earth. So we doubled that figure to obtain the rate of these objects over the entire face of Earth. There had to be about twenty such objects entering the atmosphere every minute. That was an alarming number of objects.
Atmosphere's chunky soup might be coldWhen asteroids smack into Earth's atmosphere, they leave behind a soup made of tiny chucks of rock and dust. It turns out, however, that what scientists previously thought was a fine bisque of particles is more like a chunky stew - with pieces big enough to bounce sunlight away from Earth's surface and possibly cause cooling trends, said Dick Spalding, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who is studying the process. "We caught an event near Antarctica as an outgrowth of our sensors set up to detect nuclear bursts around the globe," Spalding said. "The chief surprise was that the size of the dust particles left behind from the event were larger than we thought they would be. The prevailing wisdom was that the particles from an asteroid hitting the Earth would be nanometer sized, but we found instead they were micron sized." ... "Particles that are micron sized interact with sunlight more efficiently, so it appears that would cause an impact on climate from these particles left in the upper atmosphere," said Peter Brown, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. Micron-sized dust from asteroids 30 feet wide or bigger can linger in the atmosphere for a few weeks before making its way to the ground. Over those weeks, scientists think the dust could cause regional cooling and temporary climate fluctuations on the ground, Brown said.
by Sue Vorenberg
Albuquerque Tribune
September 5, 2005
earlier topic:
Scientists Probe Asteroid Crash
Brisbane Courier Mail | 25 August 2005 | Robyn Grace
Posted on 08/26/2005 7:00:38 AM PDT by Our_Man_In_Gough_Island
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1471169/posts
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