Tuesday, February 16, 2021

The cataclysm that killed the dinosaurs

Very recommendable! This is a rare, but much more real global threat than the Global Warming hoax or the Climate Change religion! But how rare or infrequent are these impactor events? Can smaller impactor incidents be overlooked in the record of earth? Quite possible!

The good news here is that so called sun grazers can probably be easily be detected from earth and once detected humanity would have perhaps as many as 200 years to to something about it.

"It was tens of miles wide and forever changed history when it crashed into Earth about 66 million years ago.
The Chicxulub impactor, as it’s known, was a plummeting asteroid or comet that left behind a crater off the coast of Mexico that spans 93 miles and goes 12 miles deep. ... dinosaurs ... triggering their sudden mass extinction, along with the end of almost three-quarters of the plant and animal species then living on Earth. ...
Using statistical analysis and gravitational simulations, Loeb and Siraj say that a significant fraction of a type of comet originating from the Oort cloud, a sphere of debris at the edge of the solar system, was bumped off-course by Jupiter’s gravitational field during its orbit and sent close to the sun, whose tidal force broke apart pieces of the rock. That increases the rate of comets like Chicxulub (pronounced Chicks-uh-lub) because these fragments cross the Earth’s orbit and hit the planet once every 250 to 730 million years or so. ...
The calculations ... increase the chances of long-period comets impacting Earth by a factor of about 10, and show that about 20 percent of long-period comets become sun grazers. ...
This includes an object that hit about 2 billion years ago and left the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which is the largest confirmed crater in Earth’s history, and the impactor that left the Zhamanshin crater in Kazakhstan, which is the largest confirmed crater within the last million years. ... If produced the same way, they say those would strike Earth once every 250,000 to 730,000 years. ...
the new Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile may be able to see the tidal disruption of long-period comets after it becomes operational next year.
“We should see smaller fragments coming to Earth more frequently from the Oort cloud ..."

New theory behind Chicxulub impactor that killed the dinosaurs – Harvard Gazette New theory explains possible origin of plummeting Chicxulub impactor that struck off Mexico

Here is the link to the referenced paper:

No comments: