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Meteorite Causes Illness in Peru
eldavojohn writes "A meteorite struck in Peru on Saturday leaving cinders, rock & water boiling out of the ground. Villagers nearby reported headaches & vomiting and attributed it to the event. From the article, 'Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said. Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.' It's not yet clear whether this is from the meteorite, gas trapped underground that was released or a chemical reaction between the two."
Ah, I suspect this was either not a meteorite or there is something else going on given that any meteor leaving a 30 meter wide and 20 foot deep crater (meteor being approximately 30 inches wide) is not going to hit the ground steaming hot. On the contrary, it will be cold as ice (or colder) given its composition and time for heating. However, I suppose it could also be a re-entry event from a satellite carrying a toxic payload like plutonium... After all, we have the remnants of many satellites and the debris associated with them still in decaying orbits and you can easily spot many of them. Some satellites particularly those from the former Soviet Union and China have a history of toxic components. Though I suspect we'll know soon enough if it were a satellite, it would have been tracked by numerous agencies and individuals who monitor that sort of thing.
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Not news: Meteor hits the earth
News: Strange substance associated with the meteor impact.
Now this has made international news. It seems that there should be a reaction from the scientific community. Hopefully they can verify what really happened.
If what the story is true, then there are only a few things that this could be.
1. A meteor with a strange substance (perhaps sulfur based)
2. A chunk of comet with unique properties
3. Space Junk
4. A regular piece of extra-terrestrial stuff (any of the above) that hit something on earth that caused the stink/sickeness.
Personally, I am breaking out the tin-foil hardhat.
Looking at the pictures, the ground looks like a prime area for fungus to release spores when disturbed, like anthrax.
If I got hit with a metorite, I'd have a headache too
mod me funny
Now tell me: who here doesn't want to see the darn crater? Of all things in TFA, what I really missed is a picture of the crater that the alleged meteorite created. Just seeing it would give us some idea of whether it was a meteorite at all, and if so, how big.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
People will imagine things - it's amazing how much control over our own well-being our brains have.
There's no other rational explanation. Especially if the meteorite was green. Though there's different kinds of kryptonite out there. For instance Superman is very allergic to red, although it doesn't kill him. ... This is not off topic! :-(
I like basketball!!1!
I thought I'd read those were built to withstand re-entry without vaporizing or breaking open. I seem to recall Danger-Will-Robinson arm-waving paranoia about these thermal generators the last time NASA sent one up, but the NASA boys being basically on top of it and packaging them in a way that wasn't a threat.
Meeeteyer sheeit!
Oh COOL!
When do we get the zombies?
And are they slow or fast?
What satellites around the Earth carry plutonium? The only thing I've heard of launched with plutonium was a space probe now far away from us, and that caused a big public uproar.
...or kryptonite
yet, this for now seems like radiation poisoning, with headache, vomitting and such.
Read radical news here
I for one welcome our new Peruvian meteor overloards
Better article with a photo of the impact site. Quite an impressive hole. One hopes it's just some underground gas, and not the realization of Andromeda Strain...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Phazon is here! Where's Samus when you need her?
Show me a picture of the blasted heath, I want to see! Or maybe this will be the boring kind of meteorite, the one that just raises zombies.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Either Zombies or color out of space. We are all going to die!
My other SIG is a Sauer.
It sounds like the beginning of some Sci-Fi B-Movie. When will the people start exhibiting strange powers?
(rubs hands together conspiratorily)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They're going to want to be on the lookout for androids carrying suspiciously labeled bags.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
This is an alien virus sent to kill us all.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
... well as long as their blood isn't turning to dust, I think we are in good shape. :P
clearly this 6,000 year old rock came down from the heavens as God's judgment on the unbelievers.
god damn space whore said she was clean....
Monstar L
When I read this, I thought "Woah! ALIEN DISEASES! It's like a comic book!" ;D
Don't persuade me otherwise, my version is much cooler.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Titi-ca-ca!!
You're as cold as ice, create a 30 M. wide hole
Just a block of ice, hot as a meteorite is cold
I've seen it before, it happens a lot
Crash on some villagers, trash all they've got
They look out the door to see a rock in the sky
A big stinky mess, makes the poor suckers die
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
There's no other rational explanation. Especially if the meteorite was green. Though there's different kinds of kryptonite out there. For instance Superman is very allergic to red, although it doesn't kill him. ... This is not off topic! :-(
If the meteorite was of Iron/Nickel composition there's a good chance superheated Nickel became vapourous. Nickel as a gas is highly toxic.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And yes, the Russian word for "wormwood" is Chernobyl. But ironically, this is not the FIRST thing I thought... I thought of the Phantoms from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I'd rather think about Aki Ross than some stupid beast.
Ok, where did I store my bio-aetherics shield generator...
What satellites around the Earth carry plutonium?
Most of them. If not plutonium, then a different radioisotope like 90Sr. Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTG's) are a very common method of providing power for electronics in satellites.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
From an above link:
"None of the meteorites that fall in Peru and make perforations of varied sizes are harmful for people, unless they fall on a house," he said. Another meteorite fell to Earth in Arequipa province in June.
Does Peru have some strange attraction for meteorites?
by about an order of magnitude.
Try again, it not 10 feet in diameter, its 100 feet!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
PU-238 would be an unlikely source of problems of this sort. Most of the radiation is Alpha Particles which are easily rejected by human skin. (Alpha particle dangers are almost entirely due to internal consumption.) Even if we take possible Gamma and X-Ray emissions from long decay into account, the people who were near the meteor shouldn't feel sick until an hour or two after the exposure.
According to the article (coral cache), the problem was a "strange odor" that caused the headaches and vomiting. Such an odor suggests a strong chemical of some sort that has been aerosolized near the point of impact. The officials will probably send out a Hazmat team, take air samples, collect the debris from the crash and investigate the exact composition. (Assuming that the authorities have the necessary resources. Otherwise they'll probably get someone to dispose of it and let the air clear.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If the dead start rising, I'm getting outa dodge....
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
And the Titanic was built to not sink, and Chernobyl was built not to melt down, and Challenger was built not to explode, and the Tacoma Narrows bridge was built not to collapse, etc, etc, etc...
Ok, let's refute your specious points one by one.
The Chernobyl reactor that failed was not built to not melt down - and it was being operated outside of its designed normal operating envelope which is what actually caused the catastrophic failure. Hell, the thing didn't even have a containment vessel.
The Space Shuttle Challenger didn't initiate the explosion, the solid rocket boosters did, which was because they were being used at too cold of an environmental temperature and, against warnings from the manufacturer, the shuttle was launched anyway (human error once again, but not in the design, in the use of the machine in question).
The Tacoma Narrows bridge apparently was not designed not to collapse - the designer failed to factor in the high wind speeds in the Tacoma Narrows and the resulting resonant effect on the structure into the bridge design.
In other words, your post is a bunch of pointless fear mongering along the lines of "humans can't do anything right". That is complete and utter nonsense - humans design things that work in extreme circumstances all the time. You might as well have said "Won't somebody think of the children!?!?".
Putting moderation advice in your
On the contrary, it will be cold as ice (or colder) given its composition and time for heating.
And how do you know its composition? How do you know it's 30 inches wide? All the article tells us is the size of the impact crater. That's not nearly enough for the calculator.
If the meteorite was of Iron/Nickel composition there's a good chance a fair amount of nickel was boiled off and carried into the area, possibly some produced by the head of the impact and blast.
Please see: Toxicity Summary for NICKEL AND NICKEL COMPOUNDS
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
this for now seems like radiation poisoning
I have a friend which is an expert on meteorites and radiation. Lex will surely lend the guys a hand... for a price.
No, sorry. That's horrendously incorrect. There have only been a handful of missions that used RTGs as power sources. Most satellites rely on Solar Power and batteries to operate. The reasoning is simple: Nuclear materials are EXPENSIVE. Far too expensive for anyone other than NASA to use. And NASA only uses them for very specific missions where no other option is feasible. (For example, while the current rovers have a few grains of plutonium to keep the joints from freezing on Mars, they are still powered by solar panels. The follow-up mission was supposed to use RTGs to provide a longer-lasting robot, but that's being reevaluated in light of the longevity of Spirit and Opportunity.)
Wikipedia has a list of RTGs and their missions here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#RTG_models
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It could be a downed satellite - maybe some hydrazine or something is causing the illness.
Yes, I knew I heard this before - Smallville!
Ground-penetrating meteor + very geologically active area = a world of trouble.
The game.
now that Britney has made her way on TV in S. America, there have been waves of vomiting and sickness.
Here's a picture of what it looked like as SCO streaked across the sky and made that big, noxious, radioactive hole in the ground! ;-)
Watch Reuters video. It is a Greek site, but the video is English.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
hydrazine is used a lot in satellites and is some bad juju.
Spy satellites, as far as I know. It's considering prudent to *not* have large solar panels on your birds if you don't want to make it easy for others to know where your sats are at a given time.
As far as I have ever heard, most other satellites just use solar panels.
There is an exception to this rule though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Use
By comparison, only a few space vehicles have been launched using full-fledged nuclear reactors: the Soviet RORSAT series and the American SNAP-10A.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORSAT
Radar-equipped Ocean Reconnaissance SATellite or RORSAT is the western name given to the Soviet Upravlyaemyj Sputnik Aktivnyj ( ) (US-A) satellites. These satellites were launched between 1967 and 1988 to monitor NATO and merchant vessels using active radar. RORSATs were launched under cover name of Cosmos satellites. Because a return signal from a target illuminated by a radar transmitter diminishes as the inverse of the fourth power of the signal emitted, for the surveillance radar to work effectively, RORSATs had to be placed in low earth orbit. Had they used large solar panels for power, the orbit would have rapidly decayed due to drag through the upper atmosphere. Further, the satellite would have been useless at night. Hence the majority of RORSATs carried type BES-5 nuclear reactors fuelled by uranium-235. Normally the nuclear reactor cores were ejected into high orbit (a so-called "disposal orbit") at the end of the mission, but there were several incidents, some of which resulted in radioactive material re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.MANY diseases, chemical exposures, etc. induce nausea and headaches. If radiation is causing these people to have headaches so soon after their being exposed to the meteor (I'm assuming the headaches started soon after, like within hours) they'll be dead inside of a few days. Headaches and nausea from radiation--ASSUMING, and that's a big assumption, that these are radiation-related--indicate either the gastrointestinal or the cerebrovascular stages of ARS. If it's the latter, people will die in days; the former, inside of weeks. If they ARE radiation-damaged, chromosomal analysis could be done to show it.
Given the amount of information we have to go on from the articles, there is little chance this is ARS. More information may come to light later, but for now I think it's premature to try to blame radiation.
Nuclear reactors have been used on spacecraft with very high power requirements, like Russian ocean surveillance satellites.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Forget that, find a hard hat thats made of solid Tin, I say.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The sucker coming in has a huge kinetic energy (0.5 * m * V * V) and potential energy ( m * g * h ) ... as the body falls the potential energy converts to kinetic energy, and the sucker has zero kinetic energy after impact. That energy has to go somewhere: some of it gets converted into heat as it reenters the atmosphere (heat being transferred both into the body and into the air), the rest on impact changes into translational energy for the dirt (very crude analysis of course ... the dirt will warm up, everything will reach thermal equilibrium, etc.)
...
If you think you can bring something from deep space to the earths surface 'as cold as ice', NASA/RSC Energia/ESA might want to talk to you
It was meant to wipe out BA, but they were far enough that our planet looked REALLY small to those multi eyes. The next one will be to wipe us out.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You're making assumptions here. Meteorites have often been reported falling quite hot, at least the outside of the rock if not the core. There is very little hard data on landing temperatures anyway, so we shouldn't be using temperature as a valid variable. To say it's not a meteorite because it's not hot is fallacious.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
The Tacoma Narrows bridge apparently was not designed not to collapse - the designer failed to factor in the high wind speeds in the Tacoma Narrows and the resulting resonant effect on the structure into the bridge design.
Before you re-write history, check the news reports of the day. It wasn't a very windy day. The bridge was stable at much higher winds. The moderate wind and the direction was just right to produce a resonant feedback. It wasn't high winds that too the bridge down. It was steady mild wind that kept putting more motion into a resonant system.
References;
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bridge/meetsusp.html
At the time it opened for traffic in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third longest suspension bridge in the world. It was promptly nicknamed "Galloping Gertie," due to its behavior in wind. Not only did the deck sway sideways, but vertical undulations also appeared in quite moderate winds. Drivers of cars reported that vehicles ahead of them would completely disappear and reappear from view several times as they crossed the bridge. Attempts were made to stabilize the structure with cables and hydraulic buffers, but they were unsuccessful. On November 7, 1940, only four months after it opened, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in a wind of 42 mph--even though the structure was designed to withstand winds of up to 120 mph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge
The wind-induced collapse occurred on November 7, 1940 at 11:00 AM(Pacific time), due partially to a physical phenomenon known as mechanical resonance. [4]
And for sake of balance here is a modern study stating it wasn't resonance but instead a negative feedback;
http://www.ketchum.org/wind.html
" . . . in many undergraduate physics texts the (1940 Tacoma Narrows bridge) disaster is presented as an example of elementary forced resonance . . . Engineers, on the other hand, have studied the phenomenon . . . and their current understanding differs fundamentally from the viewpoint expressed in most physics texts. In the present article the engineers' viewpoint is presented . . . It is then demonstrated that the ultimate failure of the bridge was in fact related to an aerodynamically induced condition of self-excitation or "negative damping" . . . This paper emphasizes the fact that. physically as well as mathematically, forced resonance and self- excitation are fundamentally different phenomena.
The one common thread in all the above is it was not a high wind that took the bridge down. It was the feedback pumping energy into the motion.
The truth shall set you free!
was there any black oil or flashes of bright light involved?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Beware of the Blob!
It creeps and leaps and glides and slides across the floor,
Right through the door and all around the wall,
A splotch, a blotch,
Be careful of the Blob!
Anyone else think it's odd that this article calls it a 10meter crater (30ft) but the Physorg article calls it a 30 meter crater? Was JPL involved in some metric conversions?
Well, if it is Plutonium, we'll find out in a few days, when all the apopulation will be DEAD.
We've just received this message, "Send more scientists!".
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Has anyone done a detailed inventory of the superpowers these people have acquired now?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Actually the winds were moderate when the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsed.
It could be said that the bridge was designed to collapse, but not intentionally. The designers failed to take in to account the effect of resonance. From the wikipedia article here:
The winds were considered moderate for the day 40-42mph, however they were steady allowing the destructive resonance to build. The bridge was considered strong enough to withstand hurricane force winds. It was not the strength of the wind but the design of the bridge that led to the collapse.
Nausea, headache, flu-like symptoms. Read all about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Sounds just like lovecrafts short story: "The Colour Out of Space"
So while I don't know much about plutonium, satellites or vomit-inducing meteors, but after the fuss NASA made about the plutonium-carrying Galileo, it sounds like satellites (even satellites of distant planets) carrying plutonium are the exception rather than the rule.
I Argentina people are reporting "increase in cancer rates" near cell antennas or electric poles. So I guess this could be a similar problem. There is a real case (for whatever reason), some associate it with the meteorite and the you have a chain reaction. Nothing new to see here.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Out of curiosity, how much would it take to generate an appreciable amount of heat? The idea of little nuclear pebbles slowly warming a robot on an alien world is kind of horrifying to me in sort of a primal way.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Will they have his own Clark Kent? Omar
My vote is hydrazine. If you can smell that stuff, it'll make you sick. Sick from toxic effects of the chemical, not just sick to your stomach.
http://www.epa.gov/ttnatw01/hlthef/hydrazin.html describes the effects, which seem similar to what these South Americans are experiencing.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Yes, but RTG isn't the only form of nuclear power. There's currently 49 soviet RORSAT nuclear satellites in orbit with nuclear reactors (not RTGs)
They were actually aiming for these guys: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/0426247
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Or is it USA's forces with herbicides to stop coca frowth?
...along with the Andromeda Strain and the rest:
Revelation 8
10 The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water-- 11 the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.
No, I'm not going to follow-up to spontaneous demands to debate Christianity, eschatology, or the narrative form of Revelation. Nor do I think its directly applicable or predictive--just personally somewhat intriguing.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Could this be just another failed launch such as the russian proton which failed about a week ago and was fueled with rather toxic hydrazine? Any satellites launched shortly before this peruvian incident?
Maybe this recoverable craft got recovered sooner than planned.
These people are being attacked by Martian vampires. I expect a wave of sightings of batboy. Though such a massive undertaking as this interplanetary missile is surely part of a huge attack.
By Hallowe'en, 6 weeks from now, the biters will have amassed enough strength to finally strike when we all think it's just some kind of joke. So in the meantime, stay vigilant through the night. Vampires can be stopped in their tracks, but not permanently destroyed, by staking them through the heart (wood, metal or any other stake that stays intact driven through their chest). It's also good to chop their head off, and even stuff the neck (both ends) with wolfsbane, if you can get it from some Romanian Internet pharmacy or something.
But to permanently destroy them ("kill" the undead monster), you've got to expose them to sunlight. Stake 'em and bake 'em.
And remember that those religious charms you try to use to drive them away work only as well as the strength of your mutual belief in them. So if these Martian vampires have got beyond their fear of "god", you'll just let them come close enough to strike while you mumble and genuflect. And if their tech has made them immune to the Sun, then we're in pretty deep.
I'll be gearing up the SOLASER, but that guarantees only my safety. Get your stakes ready, and hope we can ride out this season. And then on to the Red Planet, with at least rovers fitted with stakes to drag them from their burrows and pin them on their own surface for a Martian vampbake.
--
make install -not war
Worse if it hits a guano site, town dump or septic landfarm.
From the picture on Yahoo! News of the green streak as it came down, assuming the photo was of THIS particular meteorite and not some stock photo, I'd say you're probably right; it was most likely copper.
But even if it was a man made sattellite (or more likely some space junk the Russians threw off the ISS, that's SOP for them) it was still a meteorite, whether it was originally a meteor or a man made piece of junk.
The story I saw (and submitted this morning about 7:30, and no my submission isn't the one here) said that when it hit, there was boiling water spewing from the ground, so a semi-intelligent guess would be that what sickened the residents (and some cops who investigated) was from stuff in the earth rather than from space.
-mcgrew
Actually probably not to spy sats.
They where probably going to undersea cable taps.
If you are going to tap a cable you want a long lasting power source that will work well deep in the ocean. RTGs fit that bill perfectly. Plus the NSA is far more interested in signal intelligence than imagery.
Actually this is technically COMINT and not SIGINT but close enough for Slashdot.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sort of.
1) Los Alamos National Laboratory, the place that was making the fuel units for New Horizons, halted production due to a security breach. By the time production stopped, there were enough fuel units on hand to generate partial power. The New Horizons team decided they could live with the reduced power budget.
2) There were 18 fuel units in work when the lab shut down. Assuming they "went away", rather than being reprocessed, they'd likey have gone into the NRO spacecraft rather than the NSA. Solar arrays have two major drawbacks on military satellites: (1) they cause lots of drag, especially when you fly low; (2) extensible arrays can be floppy, making rapid slewing and precise pointing more difficult. You don't get much power from an RTG, though, thus ruling out the likelihood that the plutonium went into radar sats. What about big telescopic IMINT satellites? Again, not likely unless it was something radically different than typical Hubble Space Telescope / Improved Crystal layout. What's that leave? SIGINT and SDI stuff. Tinfoil hat types, feel free to speculate further...
Considering how thin the Martian atmosphere is, and how much radiation from the Sun and cosmic waves get through it, I don't think anything over there has to worry about plutonium inside a rover.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
If radiation exposure is high enough to make you vomit, you don't recover. ever.
Oh, no, I didn't mean it like that. In fact, I'm not particularly bothered about radioactivity in general, as long as I don't have to be near it. It was more the entire scenario that gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
DND#354505621 Top Secret Case File
Attn: ARPANET - MUFON & NICAP Sect. III; Tram-car Cmdr. Fenig et al., Skyland Mountain - Yucca Mountain, 34th Bee Transport Div.
Scully - I thought Fox wasn't predicting Colonization for another 3+ years.
Resist or Serve!
Warning - Capture Krycek before he spreads the Conspirator's news to Samantha.
Release the re-union movie - immediately!!!
Gen. Strughold
Boeing bomb? I'd need oxygen too...
Seems like these kinds of storys always refer to some visual subject but never actually have a picture of it. In this case, the visual thing is... the crater. How hard could it be to take a digital snap of the crater and post it on the internet? Seems like that police force in Peru could scare up a cheap digital camera to snap a pic of the crater that made six of their officers sick if they found the time to tell the world about it. I mean, it is not every day that a big enough meteroite hits the earth to leave a significant crater.
Interestingly enough, I saw a green streak in the sky at about 7pm in daylight Monday evening. I can't find the time that it occurred on any of the news pages I visit. I live in Oklahoma, so I don't know if this was a separate event, but I thought it was more than just coincidence.
it's "Hombre Estupendo"!
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
And yes, the Russian word for "wormwood" is Chernobyl.
Or maybe not.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The front will be hot from cruising into the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour. Whether or not the interior, which was at the temperature of space until it hit the atmosphere, stayed cool if the transit time was short is immaterial. Further, the energy released from the collision will certainly heat up something.
Would any plutonium induced illness manifest itself as vomiting within hours if radiation burns didn't show up immediately? That I don't know anything about.
Infuriate left and right
We need laws banning meteorites over 10 mm diameter or capable of breaking into more than 10 chunks. Well, 10 chunks is ok if they are only capable of breaking off if tools are used, and another meteorite does count as a tool. Actually, more than 10 chunks is ok if those chunks are capable of breaking off without a tool, as long as those chunks were assembled together into the meteorite before 2000.
No flash hiders either, we want to be able to see them coming so we have some warning.
No collapsible meteors in general, that is bad ju ju.
No bayonet lugs, that would be truly evil!!!
And not within 1000 feet of a school, K?
Infuriate left and right
wtf is NAS? :)
Black water!
There were six of us but now we are five
We're all talking
To keep the conversation alive
There was a senator from Ecuador
Who talked about a meteor
That crashed on a hill in the south of Peru
And was found by a conquistador
Who took it to the Emperor
And he passed it on to a Turkish Guru...
I doubt there'd be much urgency in tapping undersea cables because of 9/11. What you would want is more imagery or more satellites collecting that COMINT from cell phones and radios.
The only undersea cables needing fancy tapping were in the USSR era. All commercial cables are probably already tapped at the shore stations.
Infuriate left and right
Because it's ridiculous, that's why.
There isn't a man-made object in space that could create a crater like that. The big ones like the ISS are too low density. The high density ones like the Russian Cosmos nuclear satellites aren't big enough. All of them would have a shallow entry angle that would result in a low velocity for anything that did hit the ground.
As you speculated, when events like this are reported, the various space agencies are usually very quickly able to identify possible satellites that may have entered during a given time frame. For example, a Russian booster entered over my home county about 10 years back. It had already been identified the next morning. Incidentally, it burned up completely. No crater.
Regarding a plutonium carrying satellite. Although I've mentioned such couldn't account for such a crater, there have been quite a few put into space. Cosmos 954, which failed to reach orbit and disintegrated over Canada (note that it was not designed to survive re-entry) is a notable example, but the Russians built dozens of these satellites. Actually, the Cosmos RORSATS were powered by uranium-fueled nuclear reactors, not plutonium RTG's. Anyway, when the RORSATS reached the end of their life, the fuel bundle was actually ejected by a small rocket into a 1000 km disposal orbit, which will delay their re-entry by several hundred more years. I suppose most of the satellite bodies themselves have already re-entered.
Interestingly, this has been found to be a rather major source of space debris, as some of the liquid sodium coolant was ejected simultaneously with but free from the core. Once free from the heat of the reactor, the liquid sodium hardens into little metal spheres.
One of those fat security guards had too much pamplinas to eat, farted and caused a new chain of food poisoning effects... Sure lets blame it on the meteorite...
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
This is *clearly* the work of bugs from the planet Klendathu. Somebody call the Sky Marshall - it's time to kick some bug butt!
don't know about u but im heading to the hills, last night i watched a terrible zombie flick called 48 Weeks later(hmm wonder where they got the name), about meteorite's hitting earth and turning the Homeless into Flesh eating zombies,(as opposed to the lesser known, vegan zombies).
Uh, what? Unlike a comet a 30 inch stone will not hit the ground at several kilometers/second (ever heard of atmosphere?) and will definitely not cause that kind of a crater.
As talked about on spaceweather.com, There is much discussion on the web today concerning a reported meteorite impact in Peru which created a toxic 30-meter wide crater. This report is probably erroneous. To gouge such a crater, the meteorite on impact would have liberated energy equal to about 1 kiloton of TNT (akin to a tactical nuclear weapon) leaving a clear signal in worldwide seismic and infrasound records. So far, no such signals have surfaced. If convincing evidence of impact does emerge, we will promptly report it here. Stay tuned.
Only undersea cables that have a shore station in very friendly countries. Also if you just make a tap at the shore station then you have to worry about the locals getting bent or having to share the intel. I really doubt that Indonesia is very cooperative about tapping and they are probably a big target. Sigint birds have no need for RTGs since they are really to big to hide anyway. And just about every cell call that goes over seas will end up on a cable.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"And for sake of balance here is a modern study stating it wasn't resonance but instead a negative feedback"
You mean positive feedback, not negative. Negative feedback acts to damp the driving source, positive acts to amplify it.
That's just stupid. If it's just sitting there, it's not going to hurt anyone. It actually has to be aerosolized (which is REALLY hard to do without industrial equipment) and inhaled to pose a significant threat. Even indigestion poses only minimal risks as most cases have resulted in the PU passing through with no harm to the subject.
Stop listening to Nader. He doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to Plutonium.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Not all meteorites are stony or nickel iron, a larger meteorite that was primarily ices including ammonia would cause illness symptoms and cause the crater to outgass or 'smoke' as the article reports.
http://knet.asu.edu/research/?getObject=asulib:75906
Fair 'nough about NSA, but how long do the cable taps have to last? RTGs have a half-life of ~20 years, which may not be considering "long lasting" for a lot of applications.
1) I'm just repeating the news reports from at that time. (In Science, I imagine, since that's the most likely source to have covered something like that which I also read.) It's possible that the reporting or the information given to the reporters was wrong, of course.
I'm just waiting for the first reports of an alien bursting out of someones chest to hit the media.
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
mild-sickness inducing "smells" are a common form of mass hallucination. probably nothing going on here other than a meteorite impact, followed by someone who said,m "do you smell that?" and soon everyone one did, by suggestion.
Why would anyone bother with an RTG-powered tap of an undersea cable way out in the middle of the deep? Surely it would be much easier and more cost-effective to tap it when it makes landfall at either end (or if the land in question is hostile on both ends, you could place the tap in shallow coastal waters a few miles offshore with divers - should be easy to maintain/replace every few years without using an RTG.
As any geek on slashdot should be aware of.
Well unless they are lucky enough to run a cable from the tap to a shore station then the taps must be serviced and the data recovered. Take a look at the USS. Jimmy Carter.
That is the sub that will most likely be servicing any tap. So depending on the type of intel they could be serviced once a month to once a year. Twenty years is more than long enough since they will probably need to upgrade the tap to keep up with changing technology.
Fiber optic cables are harder to tap. In the copper days you could use induction to tap the cable. My guess is that still use induction but they have to find the amplifiers along the cable and use induction to read those.
But that is just a guess.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember that around 10-20 years ago, in Peru, there was this case of an near entire village beign found dead. From what very little surivors were left, they said that as they open their door to see what this panic was coming from, they would drop dead in the door way. It was later found that due to the geological conditions in the area, Co2 sat at the bottle of a lake bed until a small tremor caused some Co2 to break the surface. The air density around caused the gas to get pulled to the surface, expand and start to pocket under the lighter o2 and other gases in the air. I would no be suprised if the metorite hit a pocket of Co2 or some other gas caught in the earths crust.
Where's Mulder and Scully when you need them? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files/
I've actually experienced this before. It's sure to give you headaches and nausea. Meteorites come from very high up. Anyone climbing around on top of one will definitely get altitude sickness. Oh, and motion sickness, too.
Cold as ice? If it's been in the sun near Earth's orbit for months, it should be well above boiling.
Where's this "cold as ice" stuff coming from?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Get me 20,000 gallons of Head and Shoulders, and a fire truck. Stat.
It collapse? dang. I drove on it just last year. Dang. glad I wasn't on it when it went down. Lucky I read slashdot otherwise I would never have known. This really is news for nerds, stuff that matters......
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
let's run with the satellite idea a bit. The antipode of the crater is just off the southern coast of China/eastern coast of Vietnam. If anybody can find some info about the general direction the object was heading when it crashed we could see what areas this might have traveled over if it was indeed a satellite.
Larger copy found here.
Lake Titicaca, o Lake Titicaca
It's in between Bolivia and Peru
Lake Titicaca, yes Lake Titicaca
With waters tranquil and blue
Lake Titicaca, o Lake Titicaca
Why do we sing of its fame?
Lake Titicaca, yes Lake Titicaca
We just like saying its name: TITICACA!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I just posted something about this on Squidoo too... It seems like the news media is ignoring this right now... It's making me wonder if it's a hoax or something pretty serious... Here's my blog on it: http://www.squidoo.com/perumeteor
Also called foundry fever or Monday morning shakes. Wikipedia article here.
Basically, heavy-ish metals, in particular zinc and magnesium when they burn make zinc oxide and magnesium oxide and give you temporary flu like symptoms. People working in foundries would get a blast of it first thing Monday morning, get "the flu" Monday night, and then be desensitized to it all week long. Over the weekend they'd lose their sensitivity, and get the flu again next Monday.
In high enough doses though - it can kill. A fairly well-known blacksmith, Paw-Paw Williams, died from complications from metal fume fever.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strife_(computer_game)
Yeah, but do you know how long it would take zombies to shuffle all the way here from Peru? Be realistic, dude... you've got weeks before they reach you!
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
One of the reasons these things are so successful on Mars is the lack of fresh water in the canals. It's just weak sulphuric acid up there, no barrier to undead locomotion at all.
Of course, if the plutonium breaks up and particles of it become air (or water) borne and are ingested or inhaled, the skin stops being an effective defense (plus, you also have then the problem that as well as being a radiation hazard, Plutonium is, IIRC, chemically rather toxic as well.)
Right, which doesn't suggest plutonium (though there could be a strange odor and a plutonium release from the crash, but without independent reason to believe that the odor and the health effects came from different immediate causes you get into Occam's Razor problems there...)
It's come true! Come on, all you Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Kiwis out there! How come you left it up to a Yank to point this out? ;)
I think perhaps you may have become confused with Lake Nyos in Cameroon. The blanket of up to one cubic kilometre of gas (mostly CO2) ensuing from sudden outgassing of the lake rolled down two valleys and suffocated everything it encountered.
I think you meant to say, assumed to use RTGs on sats. Obviously they are not going to admit it (though, if wanting to have the smallest footprint in the sky, solar is all but out). As to the ID of the group using these, you forgot about several others including the DOD, and 2 fairly new ones.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The orange streak and loud bang were initially thought to be a plane crashing
I once saw an orange cloud in the air after an airborne rocket explosion near Lompoc, California.
This would tend to support earlier speculation that the toxin might be hydrazine (which is used in rocket fuel). Reports I heard at the time indicated that had the wind been blowing inland instead of out to sea, there could have been some serious health issues.
Triffid salad, anyone?
Dude, where's my packet?
Act of God! Clearly these people have violated the Laws of God and must be punished!
Or, perhaps, it is all in their heads, and nothing is really happening?
Or, perhaps, the crater opened something inside the mountain and deadly gases that have always been there are escaping and flowing down into the new crater?
Yeah, that's crazy - GOD must hate these people and must punish them.
Here's (what appears to be) a picture of the actual crater.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Even if it comes through the atmosphere cold, it's gonna heat up pretty fast when it hits the ground, right?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Many modern machines smell pretty bad if you burn them. Sats have fuel on board.
And as a matter of fact, plutonium is not that dreadfully toxic. According to Wikipedia, it causes the normal sort of heavy metal poisoning, and does it about as well as lead does, that is to say, unless you ingest quite a lot, the effects are chronic rather than acute (heavy metals basically do not leave the body once they are ingested).
However, if it's powdered, burned, or airborne some other way, really really small amounts can cause lung cancers.
Doesn't headaches and nausea sound a bit more like acute radiation sickness from a gamma emitter?
Seems most likely to me that the sat either had some kind of toxic fuel, coolant, etc. which burnt up and went airborne, or by some crazy fluke managed to hit some underground deposit of something bad, or the whole thing is mass hysteria (this is after all happening up a mountain in the middle of nowhere).
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Very clever and very believable....too clever.
That noise at the door is the Government coming to confiscate your computer, incarcerate you, and stage a gas explosion at you home.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
The scouting party stopped a few hundred yards from the village on the bank of the stream. Yen Lee studied the village through this field glasses while his men sat down and lit cigarettes. The village was built into the side of a mountain. The stream ran through the town, and water had been diverted into the pools on a series of cultivated terraces that led up to the monastery. There was no sign of life in the steep winding street or by the pools. The valley was littered with large boulders which would serve as cover if necessary, but he did not expect resistance on a military level. He lowered his glasses, signaling for the men to follow.
They crossed a stone bridge two at a time, covered by the men behind them. If any defenders were going to open fire, now would be the time and place to do it. Beyond the bridge the street twisted up the mountainside. On both sides there were stone huts, many of them fallen into ruin and obviously deserted. As they moved up the stone street, keeping to the sides and taking cover behind the ruined huts, Yen Lee became increasingly aware of a hideous unknown oder. He motioned the patrol to halt and stood there sniffing.
Unlike his counterparts in western countries, he had been carefully selected for a high level of intuitive adjustment, and trained accordingly to imagine and explore seemingly fantastic potentials in any situation, while at the same time giving equal consideration to prosaic and practical aspects. He had developed an attitude at once probing and impersonal, remote and alert. He did not know when the training had begun, since in Academy 23 it was carried out in a context of reality. He did not see his teachers, whose instructions were conveyed through a series of real situations.
He had been born in Hong Kong and lived there until age twelve, so that English was a second language. The his family had moved to Shanghai. In his early teens he had read the American Beat writers. The volumes had been brought in through Hong Kong and sold under the counter in a bookshop that seemed to enjoy freedom from official interference, although the proprietor was also engaged in currency deals.
At the age of sixteen he was sent to a military academy, where he received intensive training in the use of weapons. After six months he was summoned to the Colonel's office and told that he would be leaving the military school and returning to Shanghai. Since he had applied himself to the training and made and excellent showing, he asked the Colonel if this was because his work had not been satisfactory. The Colonel was looking not at him but around him, as if drawing a figure in the air. He indicated obliquely that while a desire to please one's superiors was laudable, other considerations were in certain cases even more highly emphasized.
The smell hit him like an invisible wall. He stopped and leaned against a house. It was like rotten metal or metal excrement, he decided. The patrol was still in the ruined outskirts of the village. One man was vomiting violently, his face beaded with sweat. He straightened up and started toward the stream. Yen Lee stopped him: "Don't drink the water or splash it on your face. The stream runs through the town."
Yen Lee sat down and looked once again at the town through his field glasses. There were still no villagers in sight. He put his glasses down and conducted an out-of-body exploration of the village - what westerners call "astral travel." He was moving up the street now, his gun at the ready. The gun would shoot blasts of energy, and he could feel it tingle in his hands. He kicked open the door.
One glance told him that interrogation was useless. He would get no information on a verbal level. A man and a woman were in the terminal stages of some disease, their faces eaten to the bone by phosphorescent sores. An older woman was dead. The next hut contained five corpses, all elderly.
In another hut a youth lay on a palette, the lower half of his body covered by a blanket. Bright red nipples
Luckily for this guy, he has a +5 shield that protects him from the affect http://www.flickr.com/photos/pumpkin/23610518/in/set-538104/.
A geothermal steam explosion would explain the smells and the sickness should enough sulphurous gases be released.
That said, seismographs across north america recorded a strange signal at about 0817GMT on the day.
The seismograph signals were unusual:
- They started with a low frequency which increased.
- The signal was observed over a much wider area than normal for this relatively small event.
This could be a seismic event which started very deep (>100km) or the result of a large atmospheric disturbance starting very high.
clearly, it's the andromeda strain.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
My guess is that the meteorite hit with enough force to trigger an underground steam explosion or release of carbon dioxide in an area with some geothermal activity. Namely, the underground water supply was probably superheated due to heat from some deeper magma body. The force of the meteorite impact flashed a quantity of that into steam and caused a steam explosion. Alternately, there was a supersaturation of carbon dioxide disolved in the ground water and the impact of the meteorite caused that to spontaneously come out of solution. Either way you get a bang with a lot of carbon dioxide and traces of other poisonous gasses.
It neatly explains the boiling water and breathing problems. Glancing at a picture of the crater, the side of the crater appears to be reddish surface lava, probably rhyolite with a high iron content and the bottom of the crater is filled with water with some foam on top (indicates something is causing bubbling). Finally, I'm left with the vague impression that the crater is rather deep for its width and the walls of the crater are a bit too steep to be due solely due to a meteorite impact.Oh yeah? You don't wanna be around after I eat too much Mexican food. It's a big risk!
It's a bug all right.
Perhaps to clarify a little - countries like Indonesia make huge use of satellite for inter-island communications. If you point a dish at near any satellite in the clark belt you'll see they are almost all loaded up with packet switched networks, E1's, or T1's - In the case of the latter two systems, these are generally filled with compressed voice trunks - including loads of cellular stuff. I think it's still fairly safe to say that a decent percentage of voice calls are routed via satellite depending upon the daily deals that carriers negotiate. They are not in it for call quality, low latency, pathways, or any other advantage the users might gain, it's simply how cheaply they can get your call to its destination.
--
Ex 3 letter agency drone.
You mean positive feedback, not negative. Negative feedback acts to damp the driving source, positive acts to amplify it.
That is exactly what I thought when I read the article. I read it twice and it is using the inverse of positive feedback. It states Negative Damping.
The truth shall set you free!
(LIP-ir) -- Peru's official government news agency reported this afternoon that scientists which went to the town of Carancas in the Region of Puno, Peru, have confirmed that the glowing object which fell from the sky on Saturday afternoon was indeed a meteorite.
...
Volcanologist for Peru's Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute (INGEMMET), Luisa Macedo, confirmed that a chondrite meteorite had caused the 17 meter (55 foot) wide and 5 meter (16 foot) deep crater when it landed on earth.
http://www.livinginperu.com/news-4730-environmentnature-scientist-confirms-meteorite-in-puno-peru-is-a-chondrite
This sounds much more like trapped gas erupting from a seep in the earth (if you have never seen a gas seep, it basically looks like a big crater filled with bubbleing mud).
The gas may contain H2S which even in small (100ppm) amounts can cause severe illness. It has a rotten egg smell that is very noxious.
Meteorites, unless they are very big, rarely make a deep crater. Essentially, they have shed most of their velocity and are in free fall (as if dropped from a plane) once they reach the lower atmosphere. Thats why they are actually cold when they hit, and not hot, contrary to popular belief. When they do have a lot of velocity and "explode", its usually a LARGE explosion, in the atmostphere, scattering pieces of meteorite in an oval shaped "strewn field" that can from hundreds of meters to hundreds of kilometers long.
no intelligent life here anyway. Or is that the reason to invade? dunno. Back to some Oprah.
.
There's a hole in the ground and something smells bad. We should all know where it came from, the same place the gigantic rampaging breast came from in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask":
Lake Titicaca, I'm looking at you.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
the russian booster reentry that you mention from ~10 yrs ago... did that happen to be over the pacific northwest? i was living in bellingham around then, and recall seeing quite a spectacular "meteorite" coming from the west and continuing over the eastern horizon. i thought i had looked up later to find it was a russian booster, but now i'm not sure. just curious, i'd love to know for sure.
Well, I'm off to the Winchester.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Wouldn't "negative damping" be positive feedback?
In 1871 the great Chicago fire spread devastation in the city. Many of you already know this, but did you know that other fires raged around the Great Lakes area on the same day? The Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, has the distinction of being the conflagration that caused the most deaths by fire in United States history.(Wiki) I've heard that similar fires occurred in Siberia and other Northern climes.
These were unusually intense fires. A shipbuilder reported that large steel beams which were stored along the Chicago river, away from all other materials, were melted in the fire. Some reported that the air itself was on fire. Many of those who jumped into the river and died were found to have charred lungs.
Those who study this suspect the fires were caused by the impact of fragments from Comet Biela. It may have brought flammable gas to these pockets of the earth's surface.
Ennyhow, the gas theory might fit here too.
...omphaloskepsis often...
"No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes; and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."
- Richard Burton, opening Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds musical
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/stuff/wowintro.mp3
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000025CO
I was just now writing a reply like yours, but I deleted it because it was wrong. Remember that its temperature will be incoming solar radiation / total black-body-esque emitted radiation. Of course it depends massively on the actual albedo of the meteorite, but if you assume it's similar to moon rocks, it should have a similar average surface temperature to the moon. Which is -53 C at the equator, and 90 C colder at 85 N latitude. So while it won't be absolute zero, it's still fairly chilly by our standards.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Tiberium?
www.shortman.com.au - top shorted stocks on the ASX
Wouldn't "negative damping" be positive feedback?
Yes. It tossed the last one in becuase it looks like a college paper done to dazzle a prof and using lots of technospeak. The actual facts could have been presented in a much better format. I just thought it was funny that he was trying to refute the other articles self feedback at resonance by using a double negative to say it is something else which turns out to be the same thing. A few Slashdotters noticed it and this is the biggest feedback on the entire post.
The truth shall set you free!
Maybe it is a chemical weapon attack. Artillery shell filled with a chemical weapon/gas, etc. Those shells have been around for almost 100 years, so nothing that their neighbors couldn't have aquired.
Well, if it slams into a cliff when falling from the orbit, then it just might be something enough to spread it out in the environment as a fine dust.
This has always been in the back of mind. Is it even possible for meteors to carry any pathogens/bacteria/viruses? You guys have already pointed out that it was probably all the dirt that was thrown up in the air due to the impact that made everyone sick. Who knows what that meteorite unearthed? My question still stands, though. Is it possible at all for a meteor to carry any of the stuff that could have made people sick? I would assume that the harsh environment of deep space, coupled with the literally scorching descent from our atmosphere would eliminate all bacteria/viruses. But you never know.
Here comes the T-virus.......
It could be Kryptonite causing all the peruvian supermen to be taken ill.
with strange purple thing covered in suction cups in tow...
Illness in towns-people believed to be caused by fallout from a large blast that occured after someone was heard shouting "I CAN'T FIND THE DAMNED CELLOPHANE GLASSES!"
Suppose it crashed into a storage shed full of pesticide, etc.
When the gas cloud struck at about 9 p.m., livestock and people laid down and died by asphyxiation The eruption of lethal mist at Cameroon's Lake Nyos in 1986 was so sudden and mysterious that many attributed it to a spiritual disturbance. Villagers offered sacrifices of young fowl to an angry Mammy Water, a spirit woman in local folklore who inhabits lakes and rivers.
Scientists puzzled for weeks before attributing the devastation to a massive burst of carbon dioxide. They found carbon dioxide levels had accumulated at the lake's bottom to such a degree that it exploded up through the lake and into the air.
Now, 13 years later, scientists fear it may happen again. "These lakes are just time bombs waiting to go off," said George Kling, a limnologist at the University of Michigan who was one of the first scientists at the scene in 1986. "They could go off tomorrow, they may go off next year, they may have gone off yesterday and we just haven't heard yet."
I don't think you could come up with a more clumsy expression if you tried.
At the bottom of the
Where do you get the 'not hot' thing? It's come through the atmosphere very, very, very fast and got very very hot very quickly. Many big meteors explode even before impact due to the frictional heating.
If it was a satellite, where is the debris field comprising the other, lighter structural elements that often survive re-entry? How was it moving fast enough or why was it massive enough to do this kind of damage?
Bet anything this was a largeish natural meteorite probably containing some hydrocarbons that have fried and released toxic gases, or it's released something noxious in the soil. Bloody interesting, either way!
This is just the beginning of the "Cloverfield" publicity campaign.
Silly. We just need to build a device to contact the meteor police. They'll come and take care of it.
As long as we find some way of distracting any purple tentacles first.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
any meteor leaving a 30 meter wide and 20 foot deep crater (meteor being approximately 30 inches wide) is not going to hit the ground steaming hot
Unless it's composed of some substance which is gaseous at atmospheric temperature
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
It seems to me that noxious fumes and the water could be a result of ammonia and water ice from a space snowball.
News just in, a small dark faced guy wearing a roman helmet and a cheerleader's skirt seen sneaking around the crash site. Possibly mumbling something about a "space modulator". Do not, repeat, do not approach!
At the bottom of the
That kind of talk is traitorous! We need to take the fight to the enemy. We should fight them there so we don't have to fight them here. The only good bug is a dead bug! We'll be greeted as liberators, I'm sure. Never forget beautiful Cusco, Navel of the World!
YES!
Actually I missed seeing it, but I heard about it on the radio in the morning and was pretty disappointed. Sounds like a pretty good bet you saw it though.
The artwork in this is stunning. Those European illustrators sure know their stuff.
-FL
My theory: get them the hell out of there, bring in the radiation gear, but I seriously doubt that it's radiation from space. Don't worry, you will not spread the zombie mutation anytime soon.
:)
I will start with the most outlandish theory first: after scientific tests they might find that the meteorite (if it carved out a 100 foot crater) may have been partially made up of either radioactive isotopes or frozen methane, BUT if so, it would more likely be part of a comet than a typical meteorite. However, are we passing through any comet tails? The astronomers haven't said so. So if it isn't a comet, then likelihood was it was a very dense and typical nickel/iron conglomerate, which if it impacted so hard as to survive the atmosphere and leave a 100 foot crater in the Andes, you may consider that since the Andes are the _youngest_ geological formation in the world, and are still rising, that the impact could have hit and disturbed an outlet where volcanic gases were building under a geological bulge, and it simply took the force of that impact to compress the earth with a shock and release all the poisonous volcanic methane and hydrogen that porous sandstone and shale rocks in geologically active areas are prone to soak up, like the Chattanooga shale that holds Radon in the Appalachians and Cumberland plateau.
As a matter of fact, it is quite possible that the impact could have released just that, but on a massive and explosive scale; if you explosively vaporised 1000 tons (approx, for a 100 foot wide crater, could have been more!) of porous shale, and _explosively compressed_ all the radon in the 10 million tons of rock _surrounding it_ with a 100-times-velocity-of-a-gunshot impact at 10,000 degrees F and hurtling 10,000 miles an hour, then if there is a natural uranium ore deposit further below which the upward mountain formation has brought closer to the surface, you can pretty much god damn guarantee that all that radon released all at once will make people in the surrounding area very sick very quickly. Especially in an Andean mountain valley which could conceivably be holding in the dense, heavy Radon like a bowl. Add that to possible compressed volcanic methane and hydrogen held in the young rock as well, magma and gases being much closer to the surface due to tectonic plates slipping one under the other just below your feet, then BOOM and you're a sick puppy! Run away, run away!!!!
But it would not be radiation from space. So turn off your mutation radar for the moment. I think it's just a matter of geology and rotten luck.
Lord o Bananas! Someone take a damn sample for analysis already so you guys will quit tearing at each other! This slap-fight makes my tummy sore.
So, just to be clear, a well-engineered bridge should have No Negative Damping. And the Tacoma Narrows bridge didn't have no negative damping.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Well couldn't it be that refrigerant unit they jettisoned from the ISS in July? They intended that to fall back to earth, but were not sure how long it would take. They said the larger components would not fully burn up, but statistically they were unlikely to fall on a civilised area. The unit was carrying ammonia. Do Peruvian villagers know the difference between sulphur and ammonia odours?
The contamination fear was not because of the plutonium, but the possibility of biological contamination.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You seem to be suggesting that a satellite crashed. But I see some problems with the hydrazine theory:
If hydrazine was used as a propellant, it would be reasonable to assume that due to the high temperatures reached on re-entry, the hydrazine would react fully on impact (i.e. explode) and so no longer be present in the environment in large amounts.
From the same article, "Accidental discharge into water, air, and soil may occur during storage, handling, transport, and improper waste disposal. However, hydrazine rapidly degrades in the environment and is rarely encountered."
From these two, I'm not convinced that hydrazine would be present in large quantities following such a crash. Consequently, I wouldn't expect that people would become ill through exposure to hydrazine.
It's also true that I don't know much about hydrazine chemistry, its physiological effects or how much is present in an average satellite.
Maybe it would be useful to consider other examples of satellite crashes and see if any data was collected that could indicate levels of hydrazine in the local atmosphere following the crash.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
But I see some problems with the hydrazine theory
The main problem with my theory is that the current report is that arsenic-laden groundwater vaporized and made people sick.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Ok, but are there any objects in space that could create a crater like that?
My point is that there is a glaring lack of skepticism in the comments here. Exactly what evidence is there that a meteorite was involved? What evidence is there that it was any kind of stellar object at all? The reports I have read say that some "farmers" (always un-named) saw a streak of light coming down from the sky and went out to investigate. Has anyone actually interviewed these farmers? All I can find is the "Municipal Authority" stating what these farmers apparently saw.
I'm not saying there is some kind of conspiracy here, merely that there is insufficient evidence to assume that the official story is accurate. Could the crater and physical symptoms also be caused by the accidental deployment of a chemical weapon?