Slashdot Mirror
Satellite Spots Massive Object Hidden Under the Frozen Wastes of Antarctica (thesun.co.uk)
schwit1 quotes a report from The Sun: Scientists believe a massive object which could change our understanding of history is hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. The huge and mysterious "anomaly" is thought to be lurking beneath the frozen wastes of an area called Wilkes Land. It stretches for a distance of 151 miles across and has a maximum depth of about 848 meters. Some researchers believe it is the remains of a truly massive asteroid which was more than twice the size of the Chicxulub space rock which wiped out the dinosaurs. If this explanation is true, it could mean this killer asteroid caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event which killed 96 percent of Earth's sea creatures and up to 70 percent of the vertebrate organisms living on land.This "Wilkes Land gravity anomaly" was first uncovered in 2006, when NASA satellites spotted gravitational changes which indicated the presence of a huge object sitting in the middle of a 300 mile wide impact crater.
City of the Elder Things beyond the Mountains of Madness
Agreed. BeauHD should be ashamed for posting this. While there are a lot of sources that there is, indeed, a crater buried under the ice, there are no credible sources about a massive object being detected. In fact, a lot of the posts about thr supposed object are speculating that there's either a Nazi base or a UFO buried under the ice. Although either one might make for an interesting X-Files story (and this was done in Fight the Future), there doesn't seem to be any credible science involved here. It's a bunch of lunatic conspiracy theories, with no reputable sources. BeauHD should be ashamed of posting this. It marks a new low for Slashdot.
Link to a scientific paper published last June with a decent set of arguments as to why it is more likely an impact crater than other types of geological formation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273313440_The_Wilkes_Land_Anomaly_revisited
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
And for those that want to see the actual article...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GC002149/full
Although there is a concentration of mass at the center of the proposed Wilkes Land Crater, as discovered about ten years ago, it's not the remnants of an asteroid. Instead, it's believed to be due to upwelling of molten rock from the mantle as a result of the impact.
A 151 miles wide by 848 meters deep? Be more consistent with your units please
I can't believe you guys posted this crap. This is stale - the news itself about the land crater dates back to 2006. Next, this article is from *The Sun* which is akin to National Enquirer. Nazi UFO base? Give me a break...... The WLC itself is pretty cool and interesting, but there are other articles that would've sucked a lot less. Here's an example: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/heres... CHOOSE A BETTER SOURCE.
No, all commercially mined iron ore is from sediments formed in the precambrian when the increasing oxygen supply on Earth converted the iron in solution in the oceans to iron oxides.
"This site has become shit a long time ago, when it started to publish political articles and was infested by Russian trolls and Trump supporters"
Triggered. Liberals support everything unless they disagree with it. Then they support extreme measures to support stopping and banning what they disagree with. Effectively they're fucking scary people.
From your friendly centrist AC who finds all extremists fucking scary but minds their own business most of the time.
Well Slashdot is quoting a science article from the Sun 'newspaper'
I missed that. Non-UK Slashdotters might not know that The Sun (a Murdock newspaper) is the trashiest daily paper in the UK, even worse than the Mirror. A Sun factoid is that the editorial policy imposes a ~1000 word vocabulary set up in the spell checkers (it may be 2000, variable, but very low anyway), to use a word outside which a writer needs special permission from the editor.
You're not getting that it's physically impossible for a large object to survive. "Releasing enough energy to cause mass extinctions across the entire planet" and "remaining with large pieces intact" are mutually exclusive. The "immensity of forces" is precisely the problem. It's like expecting pieces of the casing to survive the detonation of an atomic bomb. Only many orders of magnitude less likely.
As for cracking the planet into separate plates, however, that's not that far fetched; there is a legitimate (although controversial) scientific hypothesis that such an impact weakened the crust there and helped allow for Antarctica to break off. And collisions are a leading, relatively non-controversial theory to explain axial tilts - although primarily collisions during formation and potentially the late heavy bombardment.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?