More Evidence Supports Massive Asteroid Strike

InnerPeace Volunteers writes "From a BBC Sci/Tech article: The idea is that a giant asteroid about 10 kilometres wide, travelling at 90,000 km/hour slammed into the Earth at the southern margin of North America. This was a case of global devastation rather than North American catastrophe. The asteroid devastated pretty much everything."

Comments

Crater Size Calculator

[T-Punkt]

Well, that's funny. Just this morning I found this link:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/tekton/crater.html

Which let's you calculate the estimated diameter of the crater a body of a given size, given density, given speed and given impact angle will make on different targets. (Or reverse that and estimate the diameter of a body that creates a crater of a given size).

Accoring to this a 10km body with the density 3t/m, speed of 25km/sec (=90000 km/h) will create a crater with a diameter of ~216km when it hits Earth in an area of "compent rock or saturated soil" (target density 3t/m).

Re:Yellow journalism

[Joe Decker]

Have some crater pix. Of course these aren't surface artifacts, those would have worn away in the intervening hundreds of millions of years... but the rock densities live on.

I call this direct evidence. Your mileage may vary.

Re:What you say?

[Alien54]

Or did the mice rebuild it? Basically, more or less, yes. Considering that the Impact was 65,000,000 years ago. Plus, evolution is faster when you have a clean slate to play with.

This actually was a big thing a few years ago. Thus you have goodies like the Sky and Telescope Impact Hazards website, along with this nifty cosmic impact calulator.

To be fair, there is this article about a scientist that thinks mass extinctions are a myth. ( I am skeptical of this.

And not that a ten mile wide asteroid would make a mess, but that an asteroid needed to wipe out and actually destroy the earth would likely be much much large, maybe 1,000 miles across or more.

10 miles across is like a bug on the windshield. Note that humans are living on the outside of the windshield.

So it sounds like you get to have fun researching impact craters on google, etc.