Thursday, June 16, 2005

And now to micro-raise the fear factor just a little bit more

Marketing data for space minors which I stumbled across at this site about Meteors whacking the earth. I also had the good fortune to find some data to sate the amateur physicist in me.
From this I can now get a general rough estimate of the velocity that a star like unto a mountain may be traveling at the time of impact. That would be 40,000mp/hr or 60,000km/hr for the rest of you. I am still looking for diameters versus tonages for the various types of meteor's and impact data relating to these figures or at least some to estimate the particular event which man kind is speeding up to.


Iron meteorite..........Iron 91% Nickel 8.5% Cobalt 0.6%

Stony meteorite.......Oxygen 36% Iron 26% Silicon 18% Magnesium 14% Aluminum 1.5% Nickel 1.4% Calcium 1.3%

Earths Crust..........Oxygen 49% Silicon 26% Aluminum 7.5% Iron 4.7% Calcium 3.4% Sodium 2.6% Potassium 2.4% Magnesium 1.9%

An example of the possible riches amongst this rubble of the solar system is the asteroid Amun. The orbit of this mile-wide object comes close to the Earth's orbit and, over millions of years, it could be a threat to the Earth. Before then, however, it is likely that mankind will have visited the asteroid and mined it away to nothing, because research indicates Amun is made from that primordial stainless steel. Planetary Scientist John Lewis, from the University of Arizona, estimates that the iron, nickel and cobalt in this single asteroid is worth about $20,000 billion at market prices.

source: Encyclopedia Britannica

Scared yet? If not have a look at this article about the after affects of a meteor splashdown. Still not scared ? Good then if all of you micro-dick-tators wouldn't mind just moving to the pacific side of the worlds continents I would be much obliged. Go ahead I really think you could prove to me that by 2070 people who dwell in the earth have nothing to fear. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

The largest aboveground H-bomb test by the United States was like a firecracker compared to an asteroid impact. That "Bravo" explosion at Bikini Atoll in 1954 was equivalent to fifteen megatons (million tons) of TNT but was only about one-thousandth of the energy of a 500-yard asteroid moving at 50,000 mph. *
According to this work, a 500-yard-diameter asteroid is predicted to generate a water crater nearly 3 miles in diameter
An ocean impact by a 500-yard-diameter asteroid will vaporise about 20 cubic miles of water
The same impact on land would pulverise an equivalent amount of rock (20 cubic miles -- about 1,000 times the volume of the asteroid) and send much of it into the upper atmosphere, where it would circulate around the globe and disrupt agriculture for many months.
The planet was found to be covered with impact craters like the moon. One giant impact crater on Mercury was particularly interesting. Directly opposite the impact point, on the other side of the planet (called the "antipodal point") was a region of highly disrupted terrain with no evidence of an impact. The shock waves from the impact on one side of Mercury had traveled around the surface and met simultaneously at the antipodal point to create the chaotic features. Similar features have since been detected on several moons of the giant planets.


Past impacts with water or ice are very difficult to detect, because they leave very little evidence. One such impact is known to have occurred in the South Pacific Ocean, near Chile, about 2 million years ago. This event -- known as "Eltanin" after the ship that discovered the deposits -- involved an asteroid between 1 and 3 miles in diameter that would have created a water crater at least 40 miles across. Tsunami would have swamped coasts around the Pacific and would even have reached some Atlantic coastlines. Assuming a typical run-up factor of three, the coast of Chile would have been inundated by 250-yard-high tsunami. Likely results for other locations: Hawaii 90-yard tsunami (probably higher due to the greater run-up factor); California, 60 yards; Japan and Australia, 25 yards; New Zealand; 120 yards.


750 feet holy cow!

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