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A Massive Impact Crater Has Been Detected Beneath Greenland's Ice Sheet (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: An unusually large asteroid crater measuring 19 miles wide has been discovered under a continental ice sheet in Greenland. Roughly the size of Paris, it's now among the 25 biggest asteroid craters on Earth. An iron-rich asteroid measuring nearly a kilometer wide (0.6 miles) struck Greenland's ice-covered surface at some point between 3 million and 12,000 years ago, according to a new study published today in Science Advances. The impact would've flung horrific amounts of water vapor and debris into the atmosphere, while sending torrents of meltwater into the North Atlantic -- events that likely triggered global cooling (a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a nuclear or volcanic winter). Over time, however, the gaping hole was obscured by a 1,000-meter-tall (3,200-foot) layer of ice, where it remained hidden for thousands of years. Remarkably, the crater was discovered quite by chance -- and it's now the first large crater to be discovered beneath a continental ice sheet.
Something not known to be there amazingly found by chance.
Isn't 12,000 --3,000,000 years a pretty big window?? Or is that par for the course?
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
It also caused climate change. We should outlaw asteroids, perhaps a bunch of world leaders could fly to Paris and sign an agreement saying that no more asteroids are allowed to hit the earth, or the US should pay for damages if one does.
You're moms ...
We're dads.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
What's your estimate?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Hey, you know this thing we can do something about? Lets not do anything because it's possible for things we can't do something about to also do it! Lol!"
Honestly it's not a bad idea if only for the reason that we could gain a consensus on whether or not to just let one hit us.
Which to believe
Which to believe? The most obvious thing to believe is that your concept of science is drastically wrong.
What you should believe is that scientists will update their hypotheses and conclusions as new data becomes available. Try that out. Then you won't be so perplexed by the list you posted.
Is Paris a unit of area now?
Are we talking the 105 km^2 inside the old city walls (plus east and west parks?),
or the 17,174 km^2 of present-day Paris?
There is Paris, Tulsa the Paris of Oklahoma and now the Greenland Paris. How romantic!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis
Exactly. There is more and more evidence mounting that the 'fringe' story we're being told about human history is the mainstream view of it. Sooner or later the archeological "theories" and gradualism will collapse under the weight of geological evidence.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/Im...
So, you get a crater roughly the right size in that sort of rock if it is 2.5 km in diameter. You get 0.85 megatonnes equivalent energy, which is next to nothing. No significant global effect.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
you are describing debate, not science. What is to be gained by supporting an erroneous conclusion?
Too small, according to the impact calculator.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It has always been a news aggregator, yes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think if it was only 12,000 years ago, we'd have known about it. Physical evidence, written evidence (it would be in the precursor texts to the old testament or something).
No sig today...
On the bright side, we now have a solution to global warming. Let's get NASA on this stat!
Which we have, it is called "The Flood". And we have written texts about it ...
However written texts are not such old ... perhaps you want to google "oldest written language" or something similar.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
However written texts are not such old ... perhaps you want to google "oldest written language" or something similar.
About half that, yes, but folklore is older and it gets incorporated.
You think this was the cause of the flood?
No sig today...
Many "scientists" examinating old sites like stone henge or sites like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... believe that "the flood" happened about 12000 years ago, just before the end of the ice age. The reason is that magalitic stone sites like this have astronomic properties that point to a particular point in sky. (All over the planet big monuments point to the same point).
That is the suns rising point during the spring equinox 12000 years ago, researchers believe that this is a "time reference". Many sites also show references for water or flooding, as in pictures or smaller buildings pointing to the sign of aquarius. But why that sign would be generally associated with water, I have no idea :D
Yes, I believe that the flood myths we have have a core of truth. Otherwise not every single tribe on the planet had a flood myth. And it is plausible that we once had a civilization on the level of industrialized England 1890 or so, 12000 years ago. Just look at the difference in sea level during the last ice age and now.
Australia was connected with Asia via a land bridge from Indonesia. Japan was connected north and south with China. The mediteranean sea was mostly dry land. Great Britain was connected with mainland Europe ... If there was a high level civilization somewhere and the sea level rose rapidly (and having an impact with weeks of rain) would even be havoc for our civilization today.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Was it always like this and I never noticed?
Not always, no. For the last 20+ years, yes.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So is this the impact that caused the Caroline Bays?
"And it is plausible that we once had a civilization on the level of industrialized England 1890 or so, 12000 years ago."
And your evidence of plausibility is what, precisely? It is not plausible there are pink unicorns. Why? Fossil evidence doesn't lead to horses with horns coming out of their foreheads. But you can believe in pink ones if you like. There is also no evidence that there was anything beyond some rudimentary tools 12,000.
You don't work for the "Aliens!!" guy with the electric hair do you? He goes for that sort of thing.
Well, it is where she sat down at any rate. I think further test will indicate a bifurcated depression.
Another point that what happened a million years ago cannot be used by himanity in any practical way. All that matters is what we have now: technoloy, experiments, verifiable and falsifiable hypotheses.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Area is always measured in Rhode Islands, volume in Olympic Sized Swimming Pools, Length in Football fields, ( = 10 school buses). Information in LoC (Library of Congress). BTW, length != distance. Distances are measured in Trips Around the Equator.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There has been a theory that the end of the last ice age was reversed temporarily, causing a re-glaciation and a dip in global temperatures around 12K years ago. So far no impact craters have been found. This might be the smoking gun, a big impact crater, that melted ice sheets, stopped the Atlantic conveyor system and produced shock crystals, etc. I would also link it to global flood stories (Noah, etc), but that may be pushing it.
Alternatively, when they finally dig down and analyse the crater floor, I hope they find Atlantis.
Large metallic meteor impact? Mine it. True fact: pretty much all the gold we mine got here by way of metallic meteor impact. Our own gold supplies having sunk deep into the core before the crust was formed. South Africa got its gold this way. Of course, the crater that did it for them is a bit bigger, just the lava dome in the middle is twice the diameter of this Greenland crater.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Note that most of those sentences come from Journalism, not Science. The scientific papers will have probabilities and distributions and often alternative explanations, but the general public can't cope with that, so the journalist breaks it down to "Science proves ..."
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Dropping bombs on you're moms?
What you should believe is that scientists will update their hypotheses and conclusions as new data becomes available.
The problem with that is that so will the OJ Simpson defense team ("update their hypotheses and conclusions as new data becomes available").
"Oh . .. so you found his DNA at the scene? Well, er, ah, he "bleeds all the time", yeah, that's it! We updated our model!"
The leading hypothesis for the Biblical flood is the inundation of the Black Sea basin as interglacial rising sea levels caused the Mediterranean to spill over through the Bosphorus. The timing would have been about right for the Old Testament.
We could trawl Viking sagas for traces of the Greenland impact.
Yeah, there's no physical evidence that there was ever global flooding.
And I find the idea that an oral tradition would survive several thousand years of retelling to be...questionable.
Australian Aborigines have an accurate oral history that goes back over 10,000 years. Do a google search and there is much to read about. A quote:
The researchers now believe that these stories could constitute some of the oldest accurate oral histories in the world, passing through some 300 generations.
That's quite the range of ages: two orders of magnitude. Not an impressive estimate.
They just discovered the thing and it's buried under a huge amount ice. It's going to take a minute to find the evidence to more precisely pinpoint the impact date. Furthermore, when you are talking about geologic time, a million years is barely a blink of an eye.
From TFA:
“It is correct that the crater is not well dated but there’s good evidence that it is geologically young, that is, it formed within the last 2 to 3 million years, and most likely it is as young as the last Ice Age [which ended around 12,000 years ago],” Larsen explained to Gizmodo. “We are currently trying to come up with ideas on how to date the impact. One idea is to drill through the ice and get bedrock samples that can be used for numerical dating.”
I think if it was only 12,000 years ago, we'd have known about it. Physical evidence, written evidence (it would be in the precursor texts to the old testament or something).
Extract from the diary of Olaf Gunnerson form Greenland....."February 27th. Sitting on the glacier looking up to the sky. There's something unusual there, and it's getting bigger. In fact, I think it's coming towards me. I think it m "
...12,000 years ago we were coming out of an ice age - and have been doing so since.
"Have been doing so since? Only if you ignore the last 6000 years.
I think if it was only 12,000 years ago, we'd have known about it.
It would be shocking if we knew anything about it. It's in a remote and barely inhabited part of the world, far from any sizeable human settlement at the time, thousands of years before there were any written records we know of outside of a few cave drawings.
Physical evidence, written evidence (it would be in the precursor texts to the old testament or something).
Physical evidence outside of the geologic record would be extremely sketchy. The oldest written records we have are from about 4-5000 years ago so there would be nothing reliable in even our oldest texts about an event that happened at least 7 thousand years before our earliest written records.
Australian Aborigines have an accurate oral history that goes back over 10,000 years.
They might have an oral history with some verifiable facts but you'd have to be pretty generous with your definition of "accurate" to use the word meaningfully. There might be some evidence in the information but it's deeply unlikely that any such stories passed down through that many generations survived without substantial alterations and errors. Not to mention that there is no means to go back and actually check what the stories originally said for most types of facts.
Oral histories and eyewitness testimony are terrible forms of evidence. Not to mention once religions get involved, objective evidence tends to go MIA almost immediately.
Isn't 12,000 --3,000,000 years a pretty big window?? Or is that par for the course?
The main reason for the wide window is just that they only recently discovered it and most of the geologic record needed to pin it down more accurately is buried under hundreds to thousands of feet of ice. It's going to take them a little time to gather the evidence and narrow the error bars.
Here, there was a giant blip in the waning ice age 12,000 years ago that coincided with a major extinction level event of the mega fauna on the North American continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This crater if eventually tied to 12,000 years ago may just be the smoking gun...
Viking sagas don't exactly go back 12,000 to 3 million years.
Yeah, there's no physical evidence that there was ever global flooding.
That's not exactly true, there IS evidence that is consistent with this theory of a global flood and evidence that is inconsistent with the idea. However, what's missing is overwhelming evidence to prove it or consensus among researchers that it happened.
Consensus is that it didn't happen.
However, given that nobody was there to witnesses what did or didn't happen, we are left with little actual proof either way, just the evidence and all the possible ways to explain how it fits into the theory of choice. Some see it one way, others another, so the debate will rage long after I'm gone. Science by consensus hasn't been historically always right, though one would be thought a fool to ignore it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That's a description of religion, not science.
Is it really?
Where I understand the argument you are making, logically if you start with assumptions and doggedly try to construct ways the evidence supports that assumption as a scientists, are you not doing the same thing as religious proponents? I think they are eerily similar in appearance from the outside observer.
This whole discussion rapidly become a question philosophy does it not? Which precludes your statement actually being provably true, but just an assumption, does it not?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I think they are eerily similar in appearance from the outside observer.
Appear similar to someone ignorant about the subject - got it.
LEDs and stars are eerily similar in appearance too, from a distance. Must be the same thing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Too bad Slashdot doesn't do images (or maybe not, goatse and all). Looking at the map in the article the glacier perimeter actually follows the crater rim for about 40% of its circumference. The rim must be stabilizing the glacier right now.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The impact was massive, exactly as the head line states.
Since this is a nickel-iron asteroid there will be a mass concentration below the crater, so yes there should be anomalous mass there.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Interesting. I have a new contender for favorite name of event, the Bølling oscillation. Not quite as good as the Defenestration of Prague, but it's up there.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Honestly it's not a bad idea if only for the reason that we could gain a consensus on whether or not to just let one hit us.
How's about instead we drum up interest for asteroid mining?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Woosh!
But hey, that's what you where after wasn't it, missing my point.. Oh? You where making fun eh?
If that's what you tried to do, you just proved my primary point is true, in claiming to be the holder of "absolute truth" you've done the same logical thing as those you make fun of have done. Which again, WOOSH only bigger this time.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
NA mega fauna extinction coincided with the arrival of humans. African mega fauna co-evolved with humans, NA mega fauna didn't. The extinction spreads north to south with the human migration.
CSB: That extinction strongly contributed to holding back civilization advances in the Americas as there were no usefully domesticatable beasts of burden and those turn out to be a big deal for food production, which is a requirement for being able to support trade specialists.
They can't use erosion to estimate because it's under a glacier. For the same reason they can't sample the crater basin to use other methods unless they get funding for core samples. It sounds like they're being honest about their inability to date the crater beyond crude 'had to have happened after this distant geological event because the crater alters that geological feature instead of the other way around', which can tell you 'it didn't happen earlier than' but doesn't give satisfying information about when it did happen.
... stable genius ...
Know what you don't see much anymore?
Horseshit in a garage.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Well, there's a story of great flood associated with Sumeria's Gilgamesh, of whom the Hebrew priests might have modeled their Noah's flood story after. What seems likely is that, as glaciers receded and ice melted at the end of the last ice age, severe and extreme flooding occurred across many parts of Eurasia, giving birth to various world flood myths.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Applehu Akbar claimed:
The leading hypothesis for the Biblical flood is the inundation of the Black Sea basin as interglacial rising sea levels caused the Mediterranean to spill over through the Bosphorus. The timing would have been about right for the Old Testament.
Mmm - no. On both counts.
There's considerable controversy about whether the Black Sea Deluge was a sudden, catastropic event, or one that took place more slowly, forcing inhabitants of the basin to evacuate, but not instantly drowning them. There are experts of equal qualification on both sides of the debate, and it has not been resolved in any definitive way.
Meanwhile, the Flood Myth is a feature of many ancient civilizations' mythologies. The Sumerian version includes a man who overheard the gods planning the inundation in time to build a boat large enough to save himself, his family, and their chattels from the catastrophe.
Regardless, as Wikipedia notes, most academic scholars concur that what we refer to as the Book of Genesis was written after the hostages taken by Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BCE retuned from their captivity in Babylon with the gift of literacy. The Black Sea Deluge was therefore not even close to contemporaneous with the "record" of the Hebrew version of the flood myth - because there was none.
(Note that the much-bruited date of October 23, 4004 BCE for the Biblical creation comes from the work of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armaugh and Prelate of All Ireland, who calculated it based on the genealogy of Old Testament testament figures, as well as using Babylonian, Greek, and Roman sources to establish the starting date of Amel-Marduk's reign as King of Babylon. He also determined the birth of Jesus took place in 5 CE (because that was the year Herod the Great died). All of which was wasted effort, of course, because Methuselah (to choose only one of the figures upon which his dating scheme relied), if he ever existed, could not possibly have lived to be 900 year old. Nor could any of the other multi-century lifespans upon which his calculations depended have been accurate.)
The Old Testament, as a chronological document, is utterly unreliable. And, while the Hebrews' oral mythology certainly predates the return from Babylonian exile, the written form of the Torah probably did not exist before that time, so it's impossible to know how much of the Genesis flood story was a native Hebrew myth, and how much of it was informed by Babylonian and/or Sumerian myths to which the exiles had been exposed during their sojourn in Babylon ...
Check out my novel.
Sorry but you're sounding like one of those deranged nutcases on youtube making up shit to fill up their days. You're throwing a bunch of shit together and trying to make it all mean something.
There's a number of ideas as to why a "global" flood myth shows up IN CULTURES NEAR LARGE BODIES OF WATER, one of which being the collapse of the containment of Lake Agassiz. Others point to the eruption of Thera, or even a particularly bad annual flood of the Mesopotamian flood plane. The common point of all of these is that it affected LOCAL areas with catastrophic floods.
Flood myths are not planet wide, they're typically localized to cultures that are near bodies of water. It stands to reason that if something happens which causes a tsunami, a non-advanced culture still believing their god/goddess/gods are real are going to turn it into a myth. Just ask Pat Robertson how his myth creation of "everything bad happens because of gays" is going. There's way too many complete fucking idiots who believe his bullshit, and then give him more money.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You need to define the something in "do something about". Most of the "somethings" that people have proposed are more expensive than they're worth and result in vast amounts of dead people in third world nations. At least, that is so according to a recent Nobel Prize winner.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I think they are eerily similar in appearance from the outside observer if the outside observer is a fucking idiot.
Fixed that for you. Science doesn't twist evidence to fit the hypothesis. If you find evidence that disagrees with the hypothesis, science says the hypothesis has to change... not the evidence. That's exactly opposite for religion. ANYONE with a remote understanding of the scientific process understands that.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
This post getting modded up to +4 interesting is a perfect example of how slashdot has jumped the shark. Or at the very least proof of mod bots.
Flood myths are planet wide, and they are all cornered about rain.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes,
but the myths are all about rain, and the retreating glaciers did not cause that.
There are assumed three floods. Two caused by volcanoes around the great lakes (which would cause a quick sea level rise and tsunamis) and the third one by an asteroid/comet impact. However that was also supposed to have happened on the north american ice shield. But Greenland is close.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And your evidence of plausibility is what, precisely?
Perhaps you want to open a dictionary and check again what the words "plausible" and "evidence" mean.
If there was an civilization like my example: England around 1870/1900, somewhere e.g. in Indonesia, it is now 70m under the sea, hundreds of km off the coast, burried below sediments created over a time of 12000 years.
That is completely plausible. Is it true? No, I just made it up, obviously. It is called: "Gedankenexperiment"!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You are right. It should have been modded +5 Interesting and not +2 Informative.
So: what is your mental problem?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Thanks for helping to make my point.
How so?
Well you display all the hallmarks of religious zealots who severely judge those with whom they disagree with rude impatience. Which is why I say they are similar. You do see the irony of all this right? Yea, I didn't think so...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Most people's ideas of the "world" at the time probably involved a 50 mile radius.
between 3 million and 12,000 years ago..
we finally have it: anti-gravity has been discovered
If the crater material had negative mass it would have flown out of its own accord. No asteroid needed.
My point is that if there is no legend of a fall of great fire, wecan exclude Viking historical times from that rather broad date range.
Flood myths are not planet wide, they're typically localized to cultures that are near bodies of water
You need to read more; @angel'o'shere has it right, there are a lot of "flood stories" from cultures all around the world, even from cultures that live in the mountains.
There's also a lot of evidence for a global flood. I live at over 700 feet above sea level and over 300 miles from a large body of water. Yet, there are all kinds of fossils of sea-dwelling animals around where I live. A perfectly reasonable explanation is the land masses used to be flatter, until something (like maybe a big asteroid hitting the earth?) caused the land masses to move in a significant way. If the land masses were flatter (little to no mountains), then a global flood is quite easy to imagine. If the continents are shoved around, it's easy for mountain ranges to pop up after. The concepts are easy if you have an open mind to consider.