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Ancient Crash, Epic Wave
avtchillsboro writes "A NY Times article says that scientists have discovered evidence a massive impact crater 18 miles in diameter and 12,500 feet under the Indian Ocean. The evidence, they say, consists of four massive chevron-shaped sediment deposits on the island of Madagascar. 'Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.' Interestingly, the scientists say that the currently accepted notion that there have been no major impacts in the last 10,000 years is wrong; and that major impacts occur on average every 1,000 years, rather than the currently accepted 500,000 to 1,000,000 year interval. '(T)he self-described "band of misfits" that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world's shorelines and in the deep ocean.'"
as Surfer Dudes? We may finally be able to shed some light on kowabunga now.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Having just read "Footfall", I for one welcome our new double-trunked pachyderm overlords.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Does that mean Microsoft was behind the blue wave of death?
liqbase
When I read the title, I thought it was about Epic and a studio called Ancient that tanked.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Slashdot, where the news is stale, the editors don't edit and geeks still can't get a girlfriend.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is somewhat troubling. Before these people went looking, we assumed we had somewhere between now and 10,000 AD or so before the next major impact. (mangling the fine art of statistics, I know) Now, they're saying it could be a thousand years or less between impacts. When was the last major impact? We could be due for a serious catastrophe in very short order, practically instantaneous in geological terms.
I'm certainly not reassured by the fact that we only monitor about 3% of the sky. Sure, we think we know about every significant object that approaches Earth, but that doesn't account for rogue objects (those with either highly elliptical or hyperbolic orbits, or extrasolar objects that can't currently be tracked or predicted). Since FEMA is basically shite and lunar exploration/colonization is basically all hype at this point, what the hell are we going to do if we find out tomorrow that the world as we know it will shortly end?
Tinfoil hats aside, there's some excellent insight into scanning technology presented in the article. The idea of precisely scanning sea surface height to identify local gravitational variations interests me greatly. Just think about that for a little bit; let the sheer coolness of such remarkable precision sink in. It's also interesting to note that miles-wide craters have escaped our notice for millenia. Props for taking the obvious route and playing connect-the-dots with geological formations.
Of course, the doubt is strong already amongst the established scientific community. I'd say that since they've already done sediment tests for several sites and identified tektites neatly fused with diatoms (meteor debris melted to fossil plants), it's pretty clear that their methods are valid and are producing reliable results.
The note at the end of TFA about using Flood myths to date and place a major impact is particularly intriguing. Some of the 'researchers' that have taken the route of aggregate myth analysis have come up with some pretty questionable results, but in other cases, surprising correlations stand out. Consider that virtually every culture, living or dead, has a flood myth in some form or another. I think it's good for us all to be reminded that myths and legends are based on real people and events, however obsured by the ravages of time and creative retelling.
That's all I've got...
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
Can anyone help me with the conversion here? How many football fields to a Chrysler Building, and how many cubic libraries of congress to a Manhattan? Sheesh whatever happened to things like meters, or even feet?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Insulting Slashdot is a good way to get modded up, but pointing out the lack of girlfriends is going to swing the moderators the other direction!
N00b mistake...
You always comment on the staleness of news, then insult Zonk, make a side quip about dupes and leave the girlfriend angle out.
Thats the secret to high karma!
This happened only 4,800 years ago. The impact would have had global repercussions, so shouldn't it be reflected in written history, like in Egypt?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
"with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high" Sorry- can someone convert that to furlongs?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
If you're interested in looking at the Google Earth view of the features mentioned in the article, look here.
Be sure to look up and down the coast on either side of this particular feature.
1 Chrysler Building = 1.58 furlongs.
I'm surprised these people seem to be the first to start looking for impact craters in the Ocean, being as it covers 3/4 of the globe it stands to reason that 3/4 of all impacts are going to end up in the Ocean somewhere. Maybe it's just a case of only having the necessary technology available fairly recently but I think we ought to be doing everything we can to understand how often and how much damage asteroid strikes occur and can inflict.
Also the size of the Tsunami which created those chevrons must have been almost unimaginably huge but again its likely that for every impact of that size there would have been a lot more which haven't left such obvious signs but would still have been capable of inflicting similar destruction on coastal communities as the Indonesian Tsunami did a few years ago.
Although I think traditional science is a better method of investigating these sorts of incidents I think the idea of tracing back through myths and stories to reach an actual point in time where some group of people actually experienced the event is fascinating. Whether it's just wishful thinking or not and can ever be tied down this precisely is I think questionable.
Any event which caused waves of that size is pretty clearly going to make a big impression on anyone who witnessed any of its effects and would certainly have been talked about for a very long time but whether we can detect any of the story as it must have been originally told is, in my opinion, extremely unlikely.
They're at the south end of Madagascar. Worth a look, in fact at first glance a lot of the south-eastern coast looks like it is showing signs of where a tsunami washed inland a lot, but the chevrons are very clear when you find them. Also there appear to be some more chevrons at the top end of the country, at a different angle, but it's not my line of expertise so I may be wrong.
However it is a neat method of finding recent oceanic meteorite impacts. I don't know how long the chevrons would last - the bigger the impact the longer they'd last seems like an obvious insight though, and 600ft high chevrons would take a very long time to erode, ice ages notwithstanding.
Where's the data? Isn't this all supposed to be about peer review?
What are the co-ords of theses alleged chevrons?
... I find it difficult to understand how failure to account before for ocean impacts of meteors could change the anticipated frequency of large meteor impacts from once every 500,000-1,000,000 years to once every 1,000. Surely, a frequency of once every 1,000 years or so would mean several hundred hitting land every million years. Those would, one imagines, leave pretty obvious evidence.
Perhaps they just zoomed in too much on a Citroen dealership.
There are Chevrons all over the place here in Houston... practically on every street corner. And there's one really big one downtown, possibly indicating the epicenter of a larger impact.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
For some bored silly reason, I am waiting for the following NY Times story to be posted:
(New York) - Exxon, and Shell Oil not to be out marketed by Chevron have begun evaluation of other possible impact sites for shapes that would look like their corporate logos.
Atlantis sinking into the ocean?
Or like the crossing of the Red Sea. Where the water first pulled back and then a short while later came crashing down with devastating force.
The volcano eruption on the greek island of santorini has been suggested as a possible cause of that (and related) biblical event.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/..
You are going to get resistance from atheists and too rigid religious fundies, both,, because they simply detest using most human records that predate around 1800 or so, because it messes with their fundamental belief systems. They *have* to question older human records because having any of them prove out opens up the possibility of other things they don't want to look at. I have noticed both hard core atheists (in a "fundamental" way) and normal religious fundies simply do not want to look at the recorded evidence that would point to extra terrestrial visitation for example. Religious folks will call such past recorded evidence as angels or demons, in a sort of half assed way of acceptance, whereas atheists will say there is no evidence of any life outside of earth, simply rejecting past records as "myths". Well now, one myth seems pretty shattered and looks to be quite real. Megatsunamis would definietly fall into the massive flooding area,and we have no rational way right now to fully grok how devastating it would be to any cultures that might have arisen. I mean, look at the dang pyramids and try to explain them away like some paleolithic goat herderds whipped them things up with primitive engineering.
I don't think so. It took something a little more advanced than what we can see from the records of even 4 thousand yeas ago. So what happened to those cultures and the tech? I'll answer that, it got *wiped out*, smashed to near nothingness, by a mega tsunami. It took a LONG time to buiild back up from the remnanats of the populations that survived, and we have only the sketchiest of records, yet they all mention huge ass floods.
To me, both fundamental extremes with old records-myths-and stories and legends are basically flawed, they simply ignore the obvious postulate that we have been, and are constantly visited by, beings from other places and large chunks of rocks and ice coming in at high speed. The Tsunga event was another one, and let us hope that was it for the next thousand years.
It's a big ole universe-or multiple universes-out there, and we do have both historical and rather recent evidence, enough at least to take the notion seriously, of a lot more mass extinction events, plus visitations, but both camps dismiss it out of hand, despite most ancient cultures records, and a lot of more recent historical anecdotal.
Look at the stealth tech and transportation systems our technology has now, and how far it has come injust one century, then imagine a culture only a thousand years older (number picked at random just to make a point) than ours and extrapolate how sophisticated they might be.
A lot of researchers for years have been finding tantalizing clues, tiny, small and widespread, but *there*, to much older civilizations that might have been present on earth, and of "others" having visited, yet have been forced to the fringe science "hoot hoot hoot" group think areas. I think these asteroid impact findings, which tend to give a ton of cred to the older massive flooding records, ought to lay to rest at least a few of those hoots, and could be used to take a fresher look at some other subjects.
All this "mile", "feet" and so nonsense, like if we were in primitive company here. Drop the historic stuff and use scientific units (i.e. metric) already! That some countries ara backwards in this regard, should not hinder Shlashdot!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
Yeah, but how many libraries of congress is it in volume?
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
The last major impact event was, as everyone knows, the Tunguska Blast of 1906. So, we're safe until at least 2906.
*Wheeeeeew*
Maybe Velikovsky was right...
Save a tree. Eat a beaver.
After RTFA, I found out Ted Bryant is the Tsunami expert in this group of researchers. While researching for my thesis, I was confronted with his book, "Tsunami: the underrated hazard". This work, while being quite easy to understand, can hardly be called scientific based on his way of making citations (grouping all references at the beginning of a chapter which leaves you without the possibility to look up where he drew his conclusions from).
1 8.shtml and http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmelosh/ImpactTsunami. pdf , but also http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=10986 ).
. pdf) and, based on scientific grounds, I had to "debunk" it as several researchers have done before me), I have learned to take these reports with a grain (or better, a big portion) of salt.
Reviews of his book can be found here: http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/12/5/637 and here http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0025-3227(03)00086-0 and here: Synolakis, C.E., and G.J. Fryer, 2001. Book Review: Tsunami: the underrated hazard by Edward Bryant, Eos, Trans. Am. Geophys. Union, 82, 588 (can't find a quick link right now).
The existence of so-called megatsunamis is hardly scientifically proven, especially not by the work of Bryant (he classified sedimentary features embedded in sandstone somewhere in Australia as relics of an ancient megatsunami when in a nearby graveyard the same sandstone wouldn't resist local climate and erosion for more than a few centuries).
The propagation of tsunamis with huge waveheights seems to be limited due to dispersion effects and the so-called "Van-Dorn-Effect" should cause these huge waves to break as soon as they reach the continental shelf (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GL0219
After working some time in the field of megatsunamis (my thesis concentrated on the Cumbre Vieja Scenario postulated by Ward&Day back in 2001 (http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl
The ancient civilizations part is fascinating and I want to see some more research. There's some good stuff coming out of the pacific now, you can google around for the info, the cities off of japan for instance. The visitors part I know is real, saw a craft at close range a long time ago and it was most assuredly not anything we humans have yet (if we do I want all my tax money back that has gone into the airforce for conventional planes, and my electric bill money, etc, because whatever powered it had to have been pretty cool...). On slashdot though this would fall into fringe science with a lot of ..negative and nasty comments from the unbelievers, so I'll just pass on big conversations about it. But I'll tell you, it's real.....and it's kinda neat really *knowing* we aren't alone, even though the mainstream scientists won't acknowlege it and keep putting down the researchers.
They do seem to be more common than we, at at least I, thought. I was surprised to learn earlier this year that an old friend of mine and his colleagues from the Louisiana geological survey had found evidence of a possible impact crater two kilometers across about 52 km northeast of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. See here. That's fairly close & fairly recent, too, as it seems to be Late Pleistocene and possibly as recent as 11 thousand years ago.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Hi Mipoti, when you were banned you wrote this posting as an Anonymous Coward. I answered you here but then I realized you might not see it there, and so I write this reply to a posting you made under your nickname in the hope that you will see it.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I'm not disputing anything you say but the tsunami video which, I believe, was taken in Banda Ache, with pool below and sea wall beyond at the beach edge, shows a beautifully formed 'wave' which crests and breaks in a very surfable form, for a few seconds. I believe this happened at this particular beach because of a very steep drop-off to deep water. Another video taken at a beach with a very gradual slope, I can't remember where, shows a 5-6 foot mass of water coming in with churning whitewater at its front; the classic form we have been taught to expect. You may remember this sad footage as, towards the end, the camera pans to the right parallel with the beach to show what appears to be a young boy being overcome by the leading edge.