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Did A Comet Trigger The Great Chicago Fire?
Alien54 writes "Perhaps it was not Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern that sparked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed the downtown area and claimed 300 lives. New research lends credence to an alternative explanation: The fire, along with less-publicized and even more deadly blazes the same night in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, was the result of a comet fragment crashing into Earth's atmosphere."
Yes. It is not widely known, especially after more than 100 years, but Mrs. O'Leary's cow was actually a raptor saurus.
Kharma? BADASS
> So, this is the one that killed the dinosaurs as well, yeah?
No, the dinosaurs all died when a stegasaur kicked over a lantern...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The interesting thing about objects that enter the atmosphere is that the rate at which the outer shell ablates away from friction exceeds the rate at which heat conducts through the material. If a chunk of such a comet were to reach the surface without breaking up during the process and land nearby, you could immediately find it see (and touch if you really are up for touching *really* *really* cold stuff) that the object was still frozen.
Project Steve
I don't recall where, but I'd read that a couple of years ago. The main support came from what happend to a small town about 40 miles outside Chicago that was essentially obliterated by a rapid, intense fire. I think it was the center of the activity mentioned as "north of Chicago" in the article. I'm glad to see the theory getting a little more publicity and play.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
I like the THEORY, but this is a story from Disney's esteamed peer-reviewed Discovery channel about a theory from a man who has spent decades as a known UFO investigator.
Robert Wood's resume can be found here, at the site MajesticDocuments.com. Not that that necesarily discredits the theory, but it definitly gives some pause to the source.
Braddock Gaskill
Uh, moderators, consider the source, OK? Said site also claims to have photographic proof of a Cardinals baseball cap in NASA Mars pictures, a story about how perfume are secret biological and chemical weapons tests, and a story about the power outage covering a Martian invasion.
I'm 90% sure it's a deliberate humor site; I'd be more certain if they didn't seem to pull so many of their stories straight out of the paranoid schizophrenic playbook.
Holy Crap! Disney owns Discovery?
I don't think so. Here's a list of what Disney owns. Discover magazine is on there (scroll up to magazine titles), but it has no connection to Discovery Communications that I can find (scroll down to cable TV).
Eisner demoted!
It is worth noting that Chicago fire was not typical in many ways. The fire was unusually hot. One factory that burned melted pig iron 200 feet away. Buildings burned on a timescale of minutes, it was reported. Unlike your normal everyday fire, nothing was left half-burned. It also burned INTO the wind, which is contrary for usual fires. A guy in the New York Evening Post wrote, "buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior". The other facts I noted may be referenced in The Annual Record of Science and Industry for1876, pg. 84 and History of the Great Conflagration Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, Illinois, 1871
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I think this is an overly-complicated explanation for a tragic event. The fires were surrounded by wild-eyed accounts from people who were in mortal panic. Sensational journalism often "enhanced" the facts, and there really wasn't any way to check up on the factual basis of the stories.
There was a very long, bone-dry period before the fires. The whole area was a tinderbox, heavily wooded at the time, with lots of underbrush; houses weren't built to fire codes, communication was slow so people didn't have the chance to evacuate. The physics of forest fires have to be seen to be believed; the fire will follow the fuel, not the wind. The fire creates its own wind and becomes a temporary blast furnace. The sheer heat from such rapid burning will easily cause objects to burst into flame when not in contact with the fire. The oxygen is also rapidly consumed, and suffocating gases produced, without the need for chunks of methane.
There is also no real way to prove that many fires started simultaneously. Communication, again, was patchy and slow at best. The fire could spread along dozens of unpopulated paths and appear to pop up everywhere at once.
Accidentally starting a fire is easy, and it's not so absurd to think that fires might have broken out in a few separate locations, given the tinder-dry conditions at the time. The times could have been separated by hours and still appear simultaneous. Things like lightning, static electricity, spontaneous combustion...they're all possible, but that's looking for an over-glamorous cause to a massive tragedy.
The odds are very good that the fires were started accidentally by very mundane means. Someone's cooking fire might have wafted a spark into some dry grass, or someone might have dropped their pipe and not noticed until it was too late. The conditions were just so dry, the whole place was a firebomb on a hair trigger.
Sometimes people want to take a tragic accidental event and attach some absurd, freak cause to it. It helps distance the event from them; if it can't happen normally, they don't have to worry about the risk, right? Many people prefer the "Navy missile" theory of TWA 800, instead of the "frayed wire" theory. It makes the tragedy the stuff of legends, and it doesn't hit quite so close to home anymore.
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