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Details Emerging On Tunguska Impact Crater
#space_on_irc.freenode.net (Dusty) writes "Lake Cheko in Siberia has been noted as the probable crater of the 1908 Siberian Tunguska event. This news was discussed here in December, but details on the crater were scant. Now a new paper written by Luca Gasperini, Enrico Bonatti, and Giuseppe Longo (the same team in Bologna, Italy that made news in December) has a horde of new details on the supposed crater. The team visited Lake Cheko complete with their own catamaran and completed ground-penetrating radar maps, side-scanning sonar images, aerial images, and some sample collection of Lake Cheko. Intriguingly, they also imaged an object under the sediment that may be a fragment of the impacting body. Their paper (PDF) includes a lot more details including images, side-scanning sonar image, a 3-D view of the lake, a morphobathymetric map. It's an interesting read, these dudes are good. They plan to return this summer and drill the core if weather permits, hopefully answering the question once and for all." The same team also has a more discursive article in the current Scientific American that includes some detail on the working conditions in the Siberian summer. Think: mosquitos.
This is what I'm talking about!
No more of that crap from idle on the front page, this is what you should be posting! This makes my geekiness tingle, this is what keeps me coming back. Please, for the love of God, more of the same!
The grandparent may be thinking of this event. Had the bollide arrived a few hours earlier, it would have exploded over either Pakistan or India who were already shooting at each other over Kashmir. The explosion was twice as large as the Hiroshima blast.
Whether both sides would have held their fire in that event is hard to tell.
Mosquitoes to the point of anaphylaxis (well, that was what the rig's medic was afraid of, which is why he evacuated me back to the base camp).
Mosquitoes that can maintain eye contact at a meter range (i.e you can see it's eyes at a meter range) through the window of the car, then launch an assault on this nice juicy mammal, only being stopped by the glass of the window.
Mosquitoes that can keep pace with you while driving at 40km/hr on a dirt road.
Mosquitoes that can bite you through a leather glove, 20 times in one evening's work. They choose the clipboard hand, because you can't swat with that and get your work done.
Don't get me wrong - Siberia is interesting, but don't forget the industrial strength insect repellent and the appropriate clothing. If you don't know what's appropriate, ask a bee keeper. And don't forget the vaccination against tick-borne encaphalitis (which includes Lyme disease, I believe), which takes several weeks to become effective.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There's a similar mystery right here in the U.S. The Carolina bays are elliptical depressions scattered throughout the southern Eastern U.S. seaboard. They're mostly filled with water so form small lakes, ponds, or wetlands. But they're all approximately the same shape and orientation (but not size). A variety of theories have been posed as to their origin, including a glancing comet strike (shallow angle impacts produce elliptical craters, not round). They're not as well-known as the Tunguska event, but they're a lot more accessible if you wanted to visit a mysterious possible impact site.