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."

Comments

Re: Same?

[Black Parrot]

> So, this is the one that killed the dinosaurs as well, yeah?

No, the dinosaurs all died when a stegasaur kicked over a lantern...

Re:the flaming snowball theory?

[pyr0]

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.

Read that a couple of years ago

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

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.

Disney vs. Discovery

[tepples]

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!

other unexplained things about the Chicago fire

[CoronalPendragon]

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

Easily explained by radiation physics

[Tau Zero]

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

If you have a large and hot enough fire, heat radiation will be able to raise material to its ignition temperature some distance away. (This can be observed in forest fires; trees will burst into flame when the fire has not yet reached them. I understand that houses in the path of forest fires often burn when radiant heat ignites things like drapes.) This would also explain why a building would burn in minutes: when every room facing the front of the fire is ignited more or less at once, and the subsequent flashover ignites the far side a short time later, the building is going to burn much faster than if the blaze started at a single point.