Post by punch on Feb 17, 2010 11:08:42 GMT -5
Now, we were all taught from grade school that dinosaurs where killed off by a meteor that struck the Earth 65 Million years ago. That part of the story is true. Everything else that science came to the conclusion of isn't. We have Bill Bottke from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado to thank for the new info. Info that he found by asking a simple question...
"Where did the meteor that hit the Earth come from?"
Finding that out, would surely help tell the story of how the terrible thunder lizards where wiped out. And to find the answer, he looked to border of inner and outer space, the Asteroid Belt. Contary to movies and media, the asteriod belt isn't a wasteland of rock, it's actually very dense. In such a dense, packed area, impacts occur frequently. But due to the gravitational forces of the belt, they go unnoticed. In most cases, the impacts barely effect the belt, and broken asteroids often clutter back up to form asteroid clusters. This happens when a larger asteroid's gravitational pull draws to it smaller asteroids, usually breakage from other impacts, or it's own impacts. Apparently, there is one asteroid called Baptistine, a rather large one about the size of Houston, that experienced an impact 160 million years ago. Many of the pieces of the original mass ended up clustering back up with the mother asteroid, but some pieces where force out of the orbit of the belt. And of course, when an asteroid is forced out of it's orbit in the belt, it becomes a meteor.
And the plot THICKENS.
I know you're wondering, "But that happened 160 Million years ago." Bare in mind that the asteroid belt is a LONG way from Earth. And there as many factors that played into the events that ended the age of the dinosaurs. The main factor is called elliptical orbit. A meteor travels in the same orbit as everything else in our solar system. But as it passes a larger body in space, it gets pulled closer and closer to it by the larger body's gravity. In the case of the Baptistine pieces, it was pulled into an eventual and unavoidable collision course with Earth that in a nutshell took 95 Million years to happen. Of course, Bottke and his people needed to find proof of this. The proof was closer then you think. Two areas had it. One is here on Earth, the other surprisingly was on the moon. The crater on the moon known as Tycho ("Ty-co"), was caused by...you guessed it, a meteor fragment piece of Baptistine. The impact is estimated to have happened 80 Million years ago, about 25 Million years before the impact on Earth. The closer proof is the Chicxulub crater of Mexico, the actual impact point of the meteor that brought forth the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Meteors carry with them a distinct signature of minerals. So distinct that technology can tell and distinguish one from another. The trick was finding and matching the mineral deposits on the moon in Tychos, the minerals in the Chicxulub crater, and seeing if they were a match to the mineral make up of Baptistine. And that's where NASA came in. They have the technology, a satellite that launched some 15 years ago to monitor the belt. Using the satellite's imaging system, which can determine the minerals of an asteroid through thermal imaging, the found out that Baptistine was rich in carbonite, sulphur and chlorine. Guess what? So is the Chicxulub crater and Tychos. BOOM!!! Indisputable proof of the origin of the infamous meteor. But then came the more complex question. "We know where it came from now, but how did it end the age of the dinosaurs?"
At this point, Bottke's theory became widely accepted by the scientific community. So much so that it caused many other scientist to re-think there theories on a number of other astrological events. They knew when happened, they know how it happened, and now they knew what triggered it to happening. Now came figuring out WHAT happened. And to do that, technology came into play. Using high motion cameras (Like the ones they use on Deadliest Warrior) inside of a vacuumed chamber, they reenacted a meteor impact using a metal ball as the meteor, and a platform of fine, granulated powder to represent the Earth's surface. The findings were astounding. Running it back in super slow motion, when the ball impacted the powder, the initial impact scorched the platform, but the after effects where where the answers lie.
Powder spewed up from the wound high and tight, gradually returning to the surface. Now, let's raise this to the scale of a meteor 6 miles wide and 8 miles deep. The impact itself destroyed everything within a 1000 mile radius instantly, and caused tsunamis about 50 times the size of the one that ravaged south Asia few years back. Mind you, the Chicxulub crater is just off the gulf of Mexico, so that's a Tsunami powerful enough to hit the west coast of Africa, it literally crossed the WHOLE of the Atlantic, and totally submerged what we presently know as Central America. Upon the impact, just as the powder did in the chamber, debris from the Earth's crust and upper mantle shot into the sky as the blast radius expanded from the impact site. As it rose into the Earth's atmosphere, it heated up and became irradiated right before Earth's own gravity sucked it back up and pulled it back to the surface. This created the same effect on the Earth's surface as a blast furnace. Temperatures world wide began to sky rocket. The sky itself would have turned red. As the radiated matter came back down to Earth, the temperature reached upwards of 1500 degrees. Enough to incinerate a human being to ash within seconds. THAT'S what killed the dinosaurs. For centuries we have believed that the extinction of the dinosaurs happened over the course of years, when in fact, it took mere hours for them, and any other surface dwelling creatures unable to go underground or underwater to die before the day was even done.
The meteor is estimated to have wiped out 75% of all life on Earth. The 25% that survived are in fact creatures that dwelled underground and underwater. Some reptile, some mammal. And also, the blast and remnants of the meteor itself brought with it something aside from utter global destruction, carbon. The building block of life. Every living and non living thing on Earth is made up of carbon. So from the ashes of prehistoric Earth came the platform for the Earth we all know today. But of course, answering this ancient question brought on an even more alarming one. "Can it happen again?" The short answer is while it's estimated a 1 in 1 billion chance of the Earth being hit with a global killer, there are factors that play into it that we simply don't have the technology to monitor. We only know of what happens here in our neck of the woods. We don't know of what forces are at work outside of our view. Hell, it took us almost 100 billion years to figure out how an OLD meteor hit the Earth, no way we can possibly predict when a new one would. But what we do know is that Mankind could and indeed would survive it. By following what our animal ancestors did, enough of humanity would be able to survive another cataclysmic meteor impact. With technology and transportation, we'd be able to clear out the blast area. Sadly however, it's impossible to find space underground or below sea level large enough to hold even 25% of mankind, so loss of life on a disturbing scale would be unavoidable. And it would indeed probably cause a worldwide panic of harrowed scale. The world would be in a state of total anarchy leading up to the impact. But humanity would survive it. Those who do would inherit an Earth not like any human has seen since the dawn of civilization.
- This is an article I wrote for my journalism class.
"Where did the meteor that hit the Earth come from?"
Finding that out, would surely help tell the story of how the terrible thunder lizards where wiped out. And to find the answer, he looked to border of inner and outer space, the Asteroid Belt. Contary to movies and media, the asteriod belt isn't a wasteland of rock, it's actually very dense. In such a dense, packed area, impacts occur frequently. But due to the gravitational forces of the belt, they go unnoticed. In most cases, the impacts barely effect the belt, and broken asteroids often clutter back up to form asteroid clusters. This happens when a larger asteroid's gravitational pull draws to it smaller asteroids, usually breakage from other impacts, or it's own impacts. Apparently, there is one asteroid called Baptistine, a rather large one about the size of Houston, that experienced an impact 160 million years ago. Many of the pieces of the original mass ended up clustering back up with the mother asteroid, but some pieces where force out of the orbit of the belt. And of course, when an asteroid is forced out of it's orbit in the belt, it becomes a meteor.
And the plot THICKENS.
I know you're wondering, "But that happened 160 Million years ago." Bare in mind that the asteroid belt is a LONG way from Earth. And there as many factors that played into the events that ended the age of the dinosaurs. The main factor is called elliptical orbit. A meteor travels in the same orbit as everything else in our solar system. But as it passes a larger body in space, it gets pulled closer and closer to it by the larger body's gravity. In the case of the Baptistine pieces, it was pulled into an eventual and unavoidable collision course with Earth that in a nutshell took 95 Million years to happen. Of course, Bottke and his people needed to find proof of this. The proof was closer then you think. Two areas had it. One is here on Earth, the other surprisingly was on the moon. The crater on the moon known as Tycho ("Ty-co"), was caused by...you guessed it, a meteor fragment piece of Baptistine. The impact is estimated to have happened 80 Million years ago, about 25 Million years before the impact on Earth. The closer proof is the Chicxulub crater of Mexico, the actual impact point of the meteor that brought forth the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Meteors carry with them a distinct signature of minerals. So distinct that technology can tell and distinguish one from another. The trick was finding and matching the mineral deposits on the moon in Tychos, the minerals in the Chicxulub crater, and seeing if they were a match to the mineral make up of Baptistine. And that's where NASA came in. They have the technology, a satellite that launched some 15 years ago to monitor the belt. Using the satellite's imaging system, which can determine the minerals of an asteroid through thermal imaging, the found out that Baptistine was rich in carbonite, sulphur and chlorine. Guess what? So is the Chicxulub crater and Tychos. BOOM!!! Indisputable proof of the origin of the infamous meteor. But then came the more complex question. "We know where it came from now, but how did it end the age of the dinosaurs?"
At this point, Bottke's theory became widely accepted by the scientific community. So much so that it caused many other scientist to re-think there theories on a number of other astrological events. They knew when happened, they know how it happened, and now they knew what triggered it to happening. Now came figuring out WHAT happened. And to do that, technology came into play. Using high motion cameras (Like the ones they use on Deadliest Warrior) inside of a vacuumed chamber, they reenacted a meteor impact using a metal ball as the meteor, and a platform of fine, granulated powder to represent the Earth's surface. The findings were astounding. Running it back in super slow motion, when the ball impacted the powder, the initial impact scorched the platform, but the after effects where where the answers lie.
Powder spewed up from the wound high and tight, gradually returning to the surface. Now, let's raise this to the scale of a meteor 6 miles wide and 8 miles deep. The impact itself destroyed everything within a 1000 mile radius instantly, and caused tsunamis about 50 times the size of the one that ravaged south Asia few years back. Mind you, the Chicxulub crater is just off the gulf of Mexico, so that's a Tsunami powerful enough to hit the west coast of Africa, it literally crossed the WHOLE of the Atlantic, and totally submerged what we presently know as Central America. Upon the impact, just as the powder did in the chamber, debris from the Earth's crust and upper mantle shot into the sky as the blast radius expanded from the impact site. As it rose into the Earth's atmosphere, it heated up and became irradiated right before Earth's own gravity sucked it back up and pulled it back to the surface. This created the same effect on the Earth's surface as a blast furnace. Temperatures world wide began to sky rocket. The sky itself would have turned red. As the radiated matter came back down to Earth, the temperature reached upwards of 1500 degrees. Enough to incinerate a human being to ash within seconds. THAT'S what killed the dinosaurs. For centuries we have believed that the extinction of the dinosaurs happened over the course of years, when in fact, it took mere hours for them, and any other surface dwelling creatures unable to go underground or underwater to die before the day was even done.
The meteor is estimated to have wiped out 75% of all life on Earth. The 25% that survived are in fact creatures that dwelled underground and underwater. Some reptile, some mammal. And also, the blast and remnants of the meteor itself brought with it something aside from utter global destruction, carbon. The building block of life. Every living and non living thing on Earth is made up of carbon. So from the ashes of prehistoric Earth came the platform for the Earth we all know today. But of course, answering this ancient question brought on an even more alarming one. "Can it happen again?" The short answer is while it's estimated a 1 in 1 billion chance of the Earth being hit with a global killer, there are factors that play into it that we simply don't have the technology to monitor. We only know of what happens here in our neck of the woods. We don't know of what forces are at work outside of our view. Hell, it took us almost 100 billion years to figure out how an OLD meteor hit the Earth, no way we can possibly predict when a new one would. But what we do know is that Mankind could and indeed would survive it. By following what our animal ancestors did, enough of humanity would be able to survive another cataclysmic meteor impact. With technology and transportation, we'd be able to clear out the blast area. Sadly however, it's impossible to find space underground or below sea level large enough to hold even 25% of mankind, so loss of life on a disturbing scale would be unavoidable. And it would indeed probably cause a worldwide panic of harrowed scale. The world would be in a state of total anarchy leading up to the impact. But humanity would survive it. Those who do would inherit an Earth not like any human has seen since the dawn of civilization.
- This is an article I wrote for my journalism class.
, but it's great to see more sides then the profane to Mr. Punch ;D
