oh my taw..

oh my

007

I heard somewhere or other, that when the asteroid was smashing into the earth, the tip of it was still 35,000 feet in the air. But surely something that big would've torn the earth in two?

Considering the currently agreed upon theory of the origin of the Moon, ff, it would take something rather larger.

In the case of the making of the moon, the other other object was many multiple times larger than the one put forward as the cause of the Cretaceous extinctions.

Considering that 35,000 feet is ~6 miles, give or take, which reaches up into the stratosphere where airliners flit about (and that 'Outer Space' as we know it begins at ~50 miles altitude)... That's a big deal to those of us here on the surface, but it's a mosquito bite to Earth- which is thousands of miles in diameter. I remember a number of years ago when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, some folks actually speculated as to whether or not a few fragments of comet would split the planet in two (forgetting, of course, the Jupiter is 1000 times larger than Earth). It just isn't that easy to break a planet. As for the silly little monkeys running around on that planet...

Actually, one of the theories- and the one which is currently on top these days, IIRC- regarding the creation of Luna has an even bigger mass slamming into early Earth with such force that a gargantuan chunk actually split off from the planet to form a moon... the Dino-Killer would have been an itty bitty speck by comparison, and even that rock didn't blow the planet apart (it 'merely' blew a piece of it off).

The fun part is that we have -><- this much chance of actually spotting a threatening object before it's too late to do MacGuyver ourselves a way of dealing with it- whether the rock was the size of a small car (able to devastate a city), a small country, or a small moon. We could be a few moments away from getting the ultimate rock-to-the-head treatment from Mother Nature and not even know about it at any given time. ^_^

*edit* darn, I've been pre-empted! *shakes a fist in mock anger* Cursed be my pathological need to make wordy posts!

Edited by - NukeIt on 9/17/2007 6:34:52 AM

Edited by - NukeIt on 9/17/2007 6:37:06 AM

the atmosphere is actually very thin, effs, it's only a fraction of the diameter of the Earth.

Regarding ash and the KT layer ... Aren't there some areas where ash also has been found? I think it is not commonly found, though.

I think that a cataclysmic asteroid collision is an element to the Cretaceous extinctions. Probably is the catalyst for it. The asteroid collision may have setoff enough of a climate change to make it less conducive to support larger dinosaur life and the ones that depended upon them.

It is likely that environmentally and biologically, the dinosaurs at that point were transitioning anyway.

I.e.: - The emergence of feathered and warm blooded dinosaurs and their progeny in the birds we see today.

My two cents worth.
As with nature itself, populations can and do reach a "critical mass" where the global supply vs demand just plain falters. It gives out. With that, you begin having massive die offs of entire species.
The impact I believe was just one piece of the puzzle that added to the demise of the dinosaurs. Wether or not it was the coup de gras, we're still speculating.
It very well could have been that several impacts occured roughly around the same epoch. This would much better explain a total extinction event.
Not just one impact, but several and possibly spread out over a millinea.
Enough to cause a cataclysmic change in global climate and destruction of the food chain.
Much of fossile evidence suggests that many groups of animals were found together which suggests an immediate event that took all those in the groups in one fell swoop. However, the layers at which these fossile "herds" were found are various, suggesting a chain of events occuring over a much broader period of time.
Now, for the record: Finding fossilized remains of animals is not a true indication of the size of the actual population at the time of the extinction level events. Those are merely a fractal representation of what the total population of animals could have really been. This would better explain the "critical mass" effect of a population. Perhaps a ratio of 10,000:1 fossiles to actual creatures never found (or fossilized) would be the better descriptive.
In actuality, for remains to become "fossilized" requires specific favorable conditions to exist.

The Chix* crater is a "smoking gun" , but it's not the only one. There is vast evidence being overlooked and not taken into consideration.

Suppose for instance: We get an impact so tremendous that it could set off a chain of volcanic events. The ash clouds from that alone would be enough to impact the environment for an extended period of time. However, something has to follow up with those events which would "add fuel to an already burning fire" .
In theory: a massive impact triggering volcanic events, followed by subsequent impacts. That coupled with overpopulation and a diminishing food supply must have surely been the cause.

im worried about one thing tbh, its been god knows how long since a roid hit earth.... whens the next one going to be? and remember, each telescope we have can only see a fraction of the sky lol

Universal Modding Forums

well, Shoemaker/Levy9 was definately a wakeup call. (the comet fragments that we actually witnessed impacting Jupiter)

true, but that was rather far away..... just to think, there is a asteriod heading for us (or if some fancy calculations are done, work out one that would hit us.....) just hope we have mastered space travel by then

Universal Modding Forums

edited out sig


Edited by - Finalday on 9/18/2007 2:28:59 PM

or we could fire a load of nukes at it. it's not like there aren't plenty to spare that no-one will ever use. launch 'em while it's still far enough away and it doesn't even have to be destroyed, just nudged into a slightly different orbit or course. would get rid of pointless waste-of-time ludicrously expensive nuclear weapons too! why bother flying off into space?

Rankor - vg, you summed up the issue perfectly.

Ed - that the dinos were transitioning shoorly suggests that there was an evolutionary imperative to do so, presumably environmental?

Edited by - Tawakalna on 9/18/2007 12:15:54 PM

In all likelyhood, the probability of a large asteroid impacting Earth is absurdly slim (not impossible, just slim. And certainly not regular). For one, on a cosmic scale, Earth is a bloodly small target with a bloody small gravity well (Compared to say, Jupiter, or that big ball of plasma outside our windows every morning).

Jupiter's impact wasn't that unlikely, altogether. With an object as large as Jupiter in the solar system (And the relativley colossal gravity well it generates), it tends to 'hoover' up all the random debris and dust, making the probability of something (like shoemaker) colliding with it a fair bit higher.
That and the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was already orbiting jupiter in the first place...

Environmental change influences which mutations that "breed true" work and which ones are "non-optimal," I would say.

Rather than an organized method of natural selection, it is more like throwing things (mutations) against a wall and seeing which ones stick, isn't it?

The earliest traces of feathered dinosaurs date back approx 120MYA so it isn't obvious that a change such as an asteroid strike had much to do with their emergence.

accepted - I did not wish to give the impression that I was implying that the KT extinction event was the impetus to dinosaurian evolution. Such a process had of course been ongoing for a long time.