New NASA Maps Show A Bad Day On Earth

Stephen Lau writes "ScienceDaily has an article talking about the new NASA maps that reveal the geography of the North American continent in amazing detail. One of the maps provides strong evidence of a 112 mile wide, 3000 foot deep impact crater which they believe was the comet/asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and more than 70% of Earth's living species 65 million years ago."

Comments

sounds like a dupe

[databoing]

Wasn't this in Slashdot about 2 days ago?

Re:sounds like a dupe

[happyDave]

Yes, on March 7, 2003. New NASA releases new topopgraphic map.

Re:sounds like a dupe

[_anomaly_]

Isn't posting a story on slashdot that links to a government website (which results in bringing down said website) considered an act of terror?

A Meteor Did *NOT* Kill the Dinosaurs

[egg troll]

Everyone knows that cigarette smoking did. At least that's what Gary Larson has hypothesized.

Re:A Meteor Did *NOT* Kill the Dinosaurs

[whovian]

Acutally it was Homer Simpson's sneeze.

Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[ArmorFiend]

It seems whenever anyone finds a reasonably large crater, they declare "this is it, this is the one that killed the dinos". It grabs headlines. I'd hate to be a dinosaur, because it seems like I'd've been extinctified about 12 times over by genocidal asteroid de jour.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Malc]

They've been talking about an asteroid landing in the Gulf of Mexico since before I studied Geology in 1990. I remember being taught about the ejector blanket evidence they'd discovered in amongst the rock layers. The actual crater is rather harder to find due to it being submerged and eroded - it's not like it's obvious like the one in the desert in Arizona.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[rabiteman]

It seems whenever anyone finds a reasonably large crater, they declare "this is it, this is the one that killed the dinos". It grabs headlines. I'd hate to be a dinosaur, because it seems like I'd've been extinctified about 12 times over by genocidal asteroid de jour.

Well, the first asteroid was just a warning. Then the next ten were warnings, too. This current one, on the other hand... was the final chance for the dinosaurs to get their act in gear. In a few months, satellites will discover evidence of a 13th apocalyptic asteroid in Siberia. That's the one that took out the dinosaurs.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[$$$$$exyGal]

Quote from the article:

... the flat limestone plateau of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula

In this particular case, though, this research is verifying a long held belief that a giant asteroid/comet hit the Yucatan Peninsula. This is not news of a new asteroid.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Anonymous Coward]

And they all fail to take the bible into account: Clearly it was GOD who smote the dinasaurs as he tired of their annoyingly repetitive and formulaic gameplay, instead installing a copy a Humans v1.0. Unfortunately he's getting a little tired of this game, too, and rumor has it that he's ready to unleash some fun WMDs to clean the slate for the next game.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Xzzy]

> how do they know that this *particular* asteroid
> wiped out most of the species on the planet 65
> million years ago?

obviously they can't, with irrefutable "ah-ha this is it!" evidence. However they can narrow down the range of options for a specific candidate with things like core samples.

when an asteroid hits, it reorders the earth around it in some fairly identifiable ways. I don't know all the specifics, but it is rather common for geologists to date asteroid impacts by analyzing not just the dirt above the old crater, but the dirt below it too.

For example, if you take a core sample from a known undisturbed part of the planet, and identify at what age any specific depth was the surface of the earth, you can compare this sample to a sample taken from a suspected asteroid impact crater and date it that way.

Under the impact crater, there will be undisturbed material (fossils, stones, etc). Above it will be a messy jumble of everything, from bits of glass formed in the heat of the impact, to shattered rocks, a complete reordering of dirt layers.. stuff like that.

if you can link an event in earth's history (eg, dinosaurs going extinct) to the timeline a core sample reveals, you can get a pretty good guess for what the cause of the event was.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[DrinkDr.Pepper]

They had evidence of soil from the Yucatan peninsula in the K/T layer from outcroppings around to world, indicating that the impact took place there and scattered material specific to the peninsula, around the globe. Dinosaurs are found up to the K/T layer, but not above. This has been known for quite some time. The exact location of the crater was located around 1991 I believe, but was only corroborating evidence. The evidence comes from the composition of the K/T layer. This link might help.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Drachemorder]

"Carbon dating the ring shows that it occurred 65 million years ago"

Um, you can't carbon date an asteroid. You can only carbon date organic material, and that only up to maybe 10,000 years old or so.

If you want to date rocks, you have to use other forms of radiometric dating, which is what I assume you were referring to.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of all the dino skeletons in this crater, twisted to look over their shoulder with forelegs raised in a defensive "oh no" posture.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Spudley]

I remember being taught about the ejector blanket...

No! It's called an ejector SEAT - it only looks like a blanket when it lands, and gets completely covered up in an amusing fashion by the parachute.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[Graff]

how do they know that this *particular* asteroid wiped out most of the species on the planet 65 million years ago?

They can't be 100% absolutely positively certain, but they can get pretty close to certain. There are several ways to find out if a particular asteroid was the cause of a certain effect.

We can get fairly accurate dating of both the asteroid event and the extinction event. You can find out when the impact occurred by noting how deep the the impact site and the material ejected from it is buried and comparing it to the sedimentation rates in the area. You can also perform carbon dating or other isotopic analysis on material that was killed in the region of the event at the impact layer.

If the impact was large enough then the material that made up the asteroid should have been deposited around the world. Each asteroid has a "fingerprint" of different isotopes that is fairly unique, so the deposited layer can be identified as to which asteroid caused it. This means that there will be an identifiable layer of material in the arctic ice. Since each yearly layer has seasonal dark and light bands, just count the rings to find out how old the deposited layer is.

Dating the dinosaurs is also done pretty easily. Carbon dating and isotopic analysis can narrow down the date pretty well, as well as buried depth, sedimentation rates, and other geological identifiers. Finally, the layer that the dinosaur fossils are found in will have some of that isotopic "fingerprint" from the asteroid that impacted the Earth.

With this information you can narrow down both the impact date and the extinction dates to a narrow range. If those ranges overlap and the impact was large enough, you probably have the impact that caused the extinction. It turns out that there is probably the major impact in the Yucatan Peninsula and a few much more minor impacts that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. We've known about this for years, but more evidence never hurts.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[fermion]

I don't remember when the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction was recognized as a good possibility, but it must have late 80s. At that time we didn't know if was one or many. I know that in the early 90s the the Yucatan crater was identified as the most likely culprit, as it was big enough and contemporaneous with the extinction which put the single asteroid extinction at the forefront.

So, through most of the 90's we accepted that a single impact event wiped out the dinosaurs. Now, however, more impact craters are being found to have been formed within the crucial 65 million time frame (a search on multiple impact and dinosaur extinction). This is good news because perhaps a single big asteroid might not be fatal, and we may be more able to detect a swarm of meteors.

Anyway, science is a self correcting system, and at this point is may be best just to say it is likely that at least one asteroid hit the earth and was a major contributor to the extinction of the dinosaur. But I know that is too long for a soundbyte.

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[dsz]

There's a well-written book called T. rex and the Crater of Doom by the man who was part of the team that figured out how, when and where the asteroid hit, Walter Alvarez.

It's a very accessible read, and explains their thought processes quite clearly.

As I recall, the discovery of iridium, an element only found extraterrestrially (i.e. on asteroids), in the strata of rock that corresponds to the date of the extinction of the dinosaurs tipped them off.

-DZ

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[DarkMinds69]

And yet very few are aware of the fact that according to the fossil record, the Dino's were pretty much finished long before that blanket was laid..

Re:Man, every asteroid kills the poor dinosaurs

[PsykhoKiwi]

I think this reply is worth more mention and a better mod. From my studies in Geology, I can't remember the exact figures but the fossil records of dinosaurs finish largely before the evidence of this comet in the rock strata.
This would indicate that the dinos were already well on their way out and that this comet just made sure of it.
I also remember being shown evidence of a massive but slow and progressive climate change happening beforehand which could be attributed to the dinos pegging it.

Of course this is all circumstantial because the fossil record is massively incomplete. Just because the fossils start to disappear doesn't mean the species did, it just means that for some reason none of the species were fossilised.

Dates are very general aswell. The further back you go with radio-isoptope dating, the more inaccurate it becomes so you can only generalise and hope you are in the right area.

Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

From the 7th - NASA Releases New Topographic Map of North America

Dino Deaths

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dinos died coz they ran out of beer. Stop lying to us !

Something concrete

[BJZQ8]

Finally something people can "grab ahold of" out of NASA. If they made a bigger deal out of a lot of their other advances and discoveries they would be held in better public esteem. But the public usually only pays attention when something bad happens.

Re:If you support Slashdot, you support terrorism

[Monkey Angst]

Personally I hope the whole lot of you are arrested and subjected to sleep-deprivation interrogation techniques.

Sure. Then they can try the Chinese water torture on Aquaman. These are Linux geeks, for God's sake.

Dinosaurs not killed by comet

[guacamolefoo]

C'mon! If the dinosaurs were killed by a comet, why weren't people killed, too? Didn't you ever watch the Flintstones? Given the interspecies symbiosis, it is highly unlikely that a sudden and catastrophic loss of the dinosaurs would not have resulted in a destruction of mankind as well. How would humans have quarried rock?

No, I think a much more plausible explanation is that the dinosaurs were actually the victims of second-hand smoke, overpopulation, and perhaps disease. I mean, really.

GF.

Re:Dinosaurs not killed by comet

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt the dinosaurs got their heads stuck in the plastic ring can holders too. Damn us, damn us!

no nuclear winter

[wwest4]

The most important finding as a result of new imaging is that the mass extiction may have been caused by sulfur fumes, and fires started by hot falling debris. Before they thought photosynthesis was halted by solar obstruction from the dust cloud.

Which means that a similarly-sized asteroid may be slightly less apocalyptic than thought. Sort of comforting, though I wonder how we'd deal with global forest fires when we can't even handle a relatively small number now.

Re:no nuclear winter

[antis0c]

I've often wondered what I'd do if there were some kind of mass catastrophy headed our way. And I don't mean Osama setting off a Nuke on the east coast, or something, I'm talking about real apocolyptic stuff, the stuff that would destroy our entire society. Of course the first thought is to stock up on Guns, Food, Water and Toilet Paper. Build a shelter of some kind, that sort of stuff.

Then I'm reminded that in those situations, the people that die are often the lucky ones. So I'm torn, try to survive or just give up. I'm not sure I'd want to live a life in a post apocolyptic world anyway. So I say when the big one hits, I only need 3 supplies. A Ladder, A Lawn Chair and A bottle of Southern Comfort. This way at least I have a decent view.

Re:no nuclear winter

[Torgo's Pizza]

Oh, don't wuss out completely. I have learned from playing Fallout 1 & 2, Wasteland and watching all the Road Warrior movies that I can finally have a pink mohawk, wear football pads and drive as fast as I want with a sawed-off shotgun in a Post-Apocolyptic world.

Re:no nuclear winter

[Ian Bicking]

Why a gun? I don't see why a post-apocolyptic world would be particularly violent, though I guess it depends on what kind of apocolypse.

If the mass of humanity was killed, and you survived, wouldn't you seek the company and assistance of others? In the wake of tremendous destruction, what purpose would violence have? Cooperation would seem infinitely more important.

Sure, in a riot people are violent. But a riot involves people doing things they can't normally do in their lives amidst their society. It's a temporary state, almost by definition.

In a war people are violent, often long after the war. But that's more than just the collapse of society, that's an extension of society's self-destruction. Few apocolyptic scenarios involve mass societal collapse as a cause, unless the apocolypse is somehow based on everyone being turned crazy by Radio Waves From Space or something (very Steven King-like). In that case you wouldn't want a gun, because you'd kill someone you love or some other horror.

It'd look real silly if the survivors of an apocolypse were toting around guns in an empty landscape.

Re:no nuclear winter

[maraist]

In a war people are violent, often long after the war. But that's more than just the collapse of society, that's an extension of society's self-destruction. Few apocolyptic scenarios involve mass societal collapse as a cause..

Step 1) Shock/Fear: Mass fear (will might die, my family might die, where will I live?, what will I eat?).

Step 2) Hysteria: People vauling their families or in worst cases, themselves over anything, including common human decency (trampling over people, driving over people, etc). At this stage, we become primally instinctive; we're in self-defense mode.. We're not able to think rationally.

Step 3) Anarchy: Hysteria slowly calms down.. We're no longer screaming (though many are still crying). Depression will start kicking in for some.. Many will lose hope. Many will start to think about the future. They'll quickly rationalize lawless activities. Rape, looting, general acts of violence.. People will chant the "end of the world", and try and live out their fantacies.

Step 4) Pragmatism: As the remaining loyalist military/police kills off the most violent offenders, the more remaining people are in three camps.

a) The "victims" that will not be able to recover on their own; they will need to be followers.
b) The "leaders", these will be people that will try and help out; working through the wake of disaster. These will be the optimisits. Being somewhat altruistic, they will fight for what they consider right, even in the face of dispair.
c) The selfish. These are people who will quickly surmise that it will take decades (if ever) to recover, and in the mean time, we will be living in the stone age. There will not be enough resources to sustain the remaining levels of population. Fresh water will be virtually non-existant due to polluting drainage, and lack of pump-work. Rain-water is likely to be hazardous, and possibly droubting. Thus the selfish will realize that if they forcibly coerse other's, the "leaders" (including the military) will have them killed. Thus they will subtly backstab, usurping power (at least within their community).

The problem is that only those smart enough to survive will become leaders. But as a follower, you can't be sure that your local leaders aren't secretly maliscious.

The fact of the matter is that people will die due to shortages, and in the face of this, the majority of people will act accordingly, even in the long run.

This will continue until either the population has dwindled to a sufficiently small group (which is unlikely given the then-newly-encouraged birthrate), or complex and corrupt power-systems will develop, which can contain the selfish class. Tyranical Dictatorships are the only systems that can contain anarchy. It is only given enough time and prosperity that benevolant systems can prevail.

In short, we're talking hundreds if not thousands of years to rebuild society.

If you're into apacolyptic tales, Revelation and Various profits (Nostradamus, etc) tend to talk about an apocalyptic aftermath which takes hundreds or thousands of years. So in short, I disagree that a cataclysmic event would have to be radio-enduced.

Alternate image

[morcheeba]

If the site is slashdotted, you can just download the full-resolution image [617.7 megabyte TIFF]

Re:Alternate image

[trmj]

my dialup is angry at you right now.

Re:Alternate image

[micromoog]

[617.7 megabyte TIFF]

I take it that the "112 mile wide, 3000 foot deep impact crater" is actual size?

Re:Alternate image

[mithras the prophet]

Since this is a dupe from last week, I had already downloaded the TIFF of the North America image, and converted it to a 1600x1200 JPEG.

You can grab it here.

Re:Alternate image

[Zathrus]

My coworker downloaded it this morning... something like 24000 x 14000. Well into the absurd category for any non-commercial use.

New meaning to NASA

[A_Non_Moose]

Now Another Slashdotting Attempt.

Re:Slashdotted...

[241comp]

Actually, it was "slashdotted" before it was posted here. I read it this morning and already then it was at a crawl. Could be because about 390 news articles already link to it?

Not Shown...

[Vampyre_Dark]

The crater that used to be their server before it was slashdotted.

Not a bad day...

[stereo_Barryo]

Actually it was a GOOD day for the earth as it got a major influx of material and upped its accretion rate, helping out in the race to be the biggest object orbiting the sun, though it still trails several other bodies, as of this writing. It WAS a BAD day for the life forms that inhabited the skin of the earth, but they didn't contribute a lot to the total mass. It WAS a GOOD day, though, for the minor life forms called mammals, as many of their predators and competitors were disposed of. Tough call on Good vs. Bad.

Re:Not a bad day...

[jagilbertvt]

Want more karma? Consider responding to any post of mine! Never fails.

Well, lets give it a try shall we?

Thanks for the karma everyone!

Re:Slashdotted...

[L0stb0Y]

Maybe it was a slashdoting that killed the...er nevermind.

Yeah, server is dead. Throw it in the crater...

(Hell, increase their budget so they can afford non-slashdottable servers)

LosT

Nope - Re:Alternate image

[Malc]

Those images have been timing out since before the first comments appeared.

In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientists have been unable to found any traces of intelligent life anywhere on that side of the planet.

Re:lucky to live in Europe

[geeber]

Last I checked, Mexico isn't part of the U.S. Yet. Perhaps we'll get to them next after we are done annexing Iraq, though.

GAAHHH!!

[Soko]

TIFF? 617 Megabyte? You moderators are cruel.

BTW, that's not a picture of a 112 mile wide, 3000 foot deep impact crater - that's an aerial view of what happened to the server when morcheeba's linkage comment was modded up so the whole of /. could see it. :-P

Soko

Crash?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Scientists believe the impact, which was centered just off the coast in the Caribbean, altered the subsurface rocks such that the overlying limestone sediments, which formed later and erode very easily, would preferentially erode on the vicinity of the crater rim.

Wait. So nothing's really changed. So they are basically still saying that the Gulf of Mexico is the "real" meteor crash site and not this dimple... Hmmm... let's see, let's keep reading:

This formed the trough as well as numerous sinkholes (called cenotes) which are visible as small circular depressions.

Ummm... yup. This is a sink-hole, a dimple in the earth caused by the sudden crash/explosion NEAR BY. This is not the crash site. I wish people would read the damn articles before even submitting them to the editors (and that opens another can of worms there, but I digress...).

Does anyone else see the irony...

[allism]

...of a post about an article being a dupe being modded redundant?

Oh, yeah, I'm killin my karma now...

Hey wait a minute...

[Bvardi]

For the sake of tradition, shouldn't we be blaming microsoft for the death of the dinosaur? :) (And for that matter pointing out that linux helps prevent system crashes of this magnitude ;)

You just posted a link to a 617M image...

[verch]

Worst slashdot effect... ever.

While it does not have these particular pictures

[SquadBoy]

here is yet another government server for us to destroy. It has many similar pretty thing for you to look at.

http://photojournal.wr.usgs.gov

partial mirrors

[cetan]

I managed to save some of the two catalog pages here:

http://www.phule.net/mirrors/PIA03379.html
and
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/PIA03377.html

PIA03379.html has the 1.5MB image.

No, I'm not going to try and mirror the 600+MB TIFF file :)

Re:partial mirrors

[cetan]

Shoot. Links would be nice, wouldn't they?

http://www.phule.net/mirrors/PIA03379.html
and
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/PIA03377.html

Re:Dead Site

[rusty spoon]

Will you post a link to it on slashdot?

Mirror

[immybaby]

Here is an annotated mirror which should help: Image

Re:That wasn't a crater.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Better yet, let it hit France. Their white flags would be useless against it."

Knowing Chirac, he'd veto any plans to evacuate.

Re:Why we shouldn't worry about another impact

[belg4mit]

Except that what survived were things like
mice and roaches, not pigs, cows and monkeys.
In any event while the species might survive,
the majority of the individuals would not.

Great resolution

[siphoncolder]

*zooms in on the 600MB+ TIFF*

Wow... I think I can see my house from here...

Dinosaurs?? Yellowstone volcano will kill US

[saudadelinux]

It pretty much could happen anytime.

http://www.solcomhouse.com/yellowstone.htm

for maps and other graphics and

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/superv ol canoes_script.shtml

for the transcript of the BBC's program. The truly scary part is the correlation of the Toba supervolcano 74K ago, and a human genetic bottleneck which happened around the same time -
a bottleneck caused by not enough of a gene pool. That one nearly took us out, and the next one, who knows?

Actually, C-14 dating works to 40000 years ago...

[horse_pheathers]

Carbon 14 is good for dating organic matter up to around 40000 years old... But there are other means of dating on a geological time scale. Forinstance, when certain minerals are melted and then cooled, they form with a crystalline structure aligned to the earth's magnetic field. By taking into account shifts in the alignment, the known rate of continental drift, comparisons to other nearby rock layers, etc, you can get a pretty good idea when those rocks initially cooled. Also, you can use radioactive elements with longer half lives than carbon-14 to date rocks, by comparing the ratio of that element to its decay products within the rock. This is what most often gets confused with radio-carbon dating, due to both techniques' reliance on radioactive isotopes. And don't forget just looking at the rock strata.... -- Horse_Pheathers

Re:That wasn't a crater.

[bluephone]

"Knowing Chirac, he'd veto any plans to evacuate."

Why? Running away is what they're best at.

If this is where the meteor hit the earth...

[CAIMLAS]

If this is where the meteor hit the earth, where's the meteor? We see all these impact crators, but nobody seems to have found - or at least mention having found - the meteor. It must've been one huge SOB, so why haven't they found it?

Could this (looking for a crater hole) be akin to something like seeing shapes and animals in the clouds? Or along the lines of finding the face of a man on mars? Topography is very diverse and complex, and there are millions of weird variations on the earth. There's a large crater in the Sea of Japan, too - has this one been discredited as causing the great evolutionary distinction of the dinosaurs?

What if - maybe - these "caters" weren't caused by meteorites or comets, or anything like that at all? What if they're something like 'sink holes' (not the right term - what I'm thinking of are the holes that are made by fresh-water springs) that once spewed up large amounts of water to flood the earth? (another extinction theory that's equally plauseable, it's just that people disvow it because it 'supports' creationism) These 'craters' could be the result of water flowing back into the sinkhole after this flood (caused by high-presure volcanic action?), bringing large amounts of soil with them - the water had to go somewhere, right?

If anyone has links or other information on where these craters went, I'd be glad to see them. It's pretty obvious to me that something that big doesn't just disappear.

Re:If this is where the meteor hit the earth...

[norite]

The reason we don't usually get to see the original meteor is simply because it has been vapourised in the intense heat caused by impact ;) If you think about it, these things may be travelling at about 150 000km/h, and all that kinetic energy needs to go somewhere, so it gets transferred to heat energy - here's an experiment you can perform in your garage - strike a metal plate with a sledgehammer several times (wear ear protection!) not only might you see sparks fly, but feel the plate and hammer afterwards - it will be hot. Meteorites usually contain high concentrations of Platinum Group Elements (PGE's) e.g. rhodium, palladium, and platinum. They also contain relatively high concentrations of irridium relative to earth because these bodies haven't had the chance to chemically differentiate them through the forces of gravity. Moreover, they have different isotope ratio's when compared with terrestial PGE's - this is how you know if it's terrestrial or not! Now, when the impact event occurs, the atoms don't get destroyed, they get transferred to the target material. (you can vapourise the impactor, sure, but you can't destroy the atoms) So you can look for these signatures geochemically, and in some cases you can even tell what type of meteorite hit the earth (stoney, iron or carbonaceous chondrite) Reference: McDonald, I (2002): Clearwater East impact structure: A re-interpretation of the projectile type using new platinum-group element data from meteorites, Meteoritics and Planetary Science, vol.37 459-464

Re:If this is where the meteor hit the earth...

[gilleyj]

Actually, by your logic, where are all the meteors and other things that have hit the moon. There are bunches of craters there. And not one big meteor sitting in the middle. Actually, quite a bit of research into this crater has been done, there is a layer of a material (compacted dust, the actual material I cannot remember. Nickel and ferrite maybe.) all over the globe which roughly coincides with the estimated impact date. This "layer" seems to be thicker around the geographical regions near the impact site. Oh right, what about that crater in Arizona? Where's the rock that made that? My point is, albeit a bad one, there are some basic laws regarding transfer of energy (some physics major or 8th grader could tell you what they are) which basically dictate that the earth is this really big huge heavy rock. And you hit that rock with basically a little rock, something's gotta give. Typically the little rock. So either it gets liquified or what not. Where's the proof? Fire a lead pellet into a brick of lead at a very very high rate of speed. What do you get? A crater in the lead block, a fine coating around and in that crater of the lead that made up your pellet. How do we know it's not a sink hole? Because of the make up of the material's around an impact site that do not coincide with the native materials of the geological area?

Re:Asteroids? Since When?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's as useless as saying "death is what made that guy die".

Re:Lets break asteroid into 2 pieces, for CA and F

[Anonvmous Coward]

"A major reason for your GDP is because your country was founded on slave labour; helping it become the richest country in the world in no time at all."

When slavery was at it's peak, the US wasn't so 'rich'. That didn't happen until well after slavery was completely abolished.

Un-doing the Slashdot effect

[Anonymous Coward]

OK folks ... I think we may have a Band-Aid® "fix" for the dreaded Slashdot Effect on the NASA PhotoJournal.

What you have to understand is that the NASA PhotoJournal is not really intended for "casual users" as a rule. It's really more oriented towards researchers. Thus, you'll find, it was easy to download full-resolution TIFFs, and the stuff like JPEGs and GIFs was really somewhat of an afterthought. Meaning, basically, that methods (cgi-bin) were provided to create those JPEG images on the fly, from pull-down menus.

Basically, part of the "Slashdotting" of the machine was the CPU being eaten alive by all that cgi-bin on-the-fly conversion stuff.

What we've done (Band-Aid® fix) is to change the interface to be more "user friendly" until a final decision is made on how to orient the site - namely, what this means is that each page will now have a thumb, and clicking on the thumb will get you a modest-sized (pre-cached, not on-the-fly) JPEG image. The original full-sized TIFF image will be available from the menu on the lower-right of the page. In addition, full-scale JPEGs are currently being generated on a back-end machine, so when those are done, they'll be transferred over and then a link/menu entry for getting the full-sized JPEGs will be provided as well as the TIFF link.

While the load average is still high, I think responsiveness should be doing better now.

(Just for fun, in case you've never been /.'ed, there's about 9,000-12,000 HTTP packets going back and forth every second at the moment, according to tcpdump.)