Chicken Little Was Right
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Meteorites, asteroids, comets, outer planet crossers, astronomical objects, celestial objects… the sky IS falling, and sometimes it’s falling in quite respectable-sized chunks. The object which fell 50,000 years ago to the Northern Arizona desert, resulting in Meteor Crater (Barringer Crater), was composed of nickel-iron, 150 feet across, weighing 300,000 tons, and traveling at 28,600 mph.
Image: Public domain, USGS
The asteroid to hit Vredefort, South Africa, is one of the largest ever known to have hit the Earth; estimated at over 10 km (6 miles) wide. At slightly over 2 billion years old, the Vredefort Crater is one of the few existing multi-ringed craters on Earth (they are usually erased by geological activity).
Not to be outdone, the Chicxulub Crater is an ancient impact crater buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula, the result of a meteor strike about 65 million years ago. This is, of course, the strike which has been implicated in the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Image: NASA/JPL CalTech – Fuchs
For meteor impacts that aren’t impacts at all, nothing can beat the Tunguska Event. At about 7:15 a.m., June 30, 1908, a meteor or comet exploded 5 – 10 kilometers from the Earth’s surface. The shockwave from the blast, believed to be about 5.0 on the Richter scale, knocked down some 80 million trees in over 2,150 sq km. The estimated strength of the blast, 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast, would certainly have devastated a large metropolitan area. Can you imagine that going off over London? Paris? New York?
Image: Historical image, in the public domain – Russia Tunguska (1927)
While most meteoroids disintegrate in the atmosphere, about 500 (ranging in size from a marble to a basketball or larger) do reach the surface. Very few objects are large enough to leave a crater, which is reassuring when you consider that they are traveling at terminal velocity. The phrase “terminal velocity” doesn’t need any assistance to sound ominous, but it does tend to take on a whole new world of meaning when you’re talking about a hunk of iron 150 feet across.
Anybody catch the meteor shower this morning? I was out at 4:30, not bad.
Unfortunaltely, I missed the meteor shower.
Please define “terminal velocity”. My defintion harkens back to da Vinci dropping balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Terminal velocity. Basically it is the maximum speed attainable by an object acting under gravity given its physical make up and the external drag forces acting on it.
If you were to drop an object it will only fall so fast because after a certain point air will provide enough drag to counter act the acceleration of gravity. Now an object might be moving pretty fast but it wouldn’t continue to gain speed.
Fast enough that you wouldn’t want to be standing under a chunk of real estate that had achieved it.
ouch! i missed something so great. maybe give us all a better far warning. by any chance is their another one of its kind in the forcast?
I’m glad you mentioned catching the meteor shower last night. In San Francisco here, I had a great show the skies were clear and the cities loom didn’t deminish my visability. The trails were bright and golden, about five really brilliant streaks across the sky; stars and satellites twinkle.
Illuminati Sino-Zionists Columbia and the THUNDERS OF ZEUS
http://hellenandchaos.blogspot.com/2009/11/illuminati-sino-zionists-columbia-and.html
NASA (petrified with terror) observes the Fleet of the Dragonians and Andromedians
http://hellenandchaos.blogspot.com/2009/11/nasa-observes-fleet-of-draconians-and.html
well i checked out the links ellhn sent .. all i can say is hmmmmmmmmm
Trudy
On Sept 1st a meteorite hit near Mio Mich, not to far from where I live. I’ve thought about trying to find it. Here’s teh link http://www.9and10news.com/category/story/?id=167859