Ancient Earth asteroid strike that dwarfed dinosaur killer still felt today Scientists say they have reconstructed an asteroid impact on Earth that was at least three times as massive as the strike that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and the new monster had effects that are still being felt today. Asteroid impact A massive headache for Earth (click to enlarge) The research, published …
Well.... between plate tectonics and erosion we may well never know where exactly it hit.
Using Google Maps, there's an area the size of Swaziland to the northwest that looks like it's been hit really hard by something, and would be at about the right distance, but looks can be deceiving, and there may well be no trace of the original crater left.
It probably isn't Vredefort, since that one is "only" 2-and a bit billion years old.
Barberton is a few hundred klicks east of Pretoria, so would be around there. A hundred or so klicks west of Pretoria is where most of the platinum mines are and their metals came from a meteor strike as well; that rock though probably broke up as there are scattered deposits of PGMs up to Zimbobwe land. Might have been part of this bad boy though.
Doubtful that any subduction took place around this part of South Africa as it's underlaid with kratons (or cratons for the new spelling) which don't subduct being several hundred klicks deep into the mantle and are part of the original crust not the johnny-come-lately sedimentary stuff.
Is it beer time already?
I find this stuff evilly amusing for some reason. It is spectacular!
It is weird that we are spending so much money on the bogus war on terror and attempting to change the climate when something like this actually poses a realistic threat. The only reason there is not a huge concern about such an event is because people are bad with figures.
The thing that caused this was big, but not big enough to see at a great distance. A similar thing could be on its way right now. We have a good probability of seeing a pretty spectacular collision at any time; not enough to wipe out life but surely enough to send a nasty earthquake and tsunami. If a rock a few meters wide hit dead-center in New York you would hear about it.
We have known of this danger for a long time. We spend more searching the skies these days than we used to but in my opinion it is not nearly enough. We should be looking as deep into as much sky as we can to get early warning and we should be working on some type of strategy to avoid species extinction if we can't dodge a big one.
Would it kill us to take ten percent of the money spent chasing the fictional Climate Change bogeyman and/or the near mythical terrorist danger or perhaps the perfectly insane military budgets and spend it on something that is actually are genuine threat of global proportions? It may well kill us not to.
The plan I would adopt would be to buy up a few Soyuz chasses, a few thermionuclear powerplants, and a few medium-powered lasers (ideally I'd get some of the USASF high-powered lasers they were talking of putting into their fighter jets, but that's so unlikely - saving the world from asteroids doesn't rank compared with wasting the US taxpayers' money) and talk NASA into letting me run on their worldwide network. I'd say with a three-orbit lead, I could bring an asteroid posing danger to the Earth, into an orbit (Lagrange 5 would be best) where it would be at danger from Earth rather than the reverse - I'd sell whatever I could mine from them just to recoup my costs.
You see, with one Soyuz-plus-laser installation ahead of the asteroid, I could slow it down and change its orbit coming out the inner system; with one Soyuz-plus-laser installation behind the asteroid I could speed it up and change its orbit coming into the inner system. And with a three orbit lead on the impact time, I'd have sufficient time to do it in.
Some people have no imaginations.
"The plan I would adopt would be to buy up a few Soyuz chasses, a few thermionuclear powerplants, and a few medium-powered lasers (ideally I'd get some of the USASF high-powered lasers they were talking of putting into their fighter jets,"
Only one of those things exists in the real world, y'know?
"You see, with one Soyuz-plus-laser installation ahead of the asteroid, I could slow it down and change its orbit coming out the inner system"
Let's see the maths. We're back to the 'bad at numbers' things again, where rocks weighing a million tons moving at 20 miles per second can be waved clear by lasering them.
"Once you've found your space rocks, what exactly do you do to stop them?"
I think it was right here on el Reg that I saw a cunning plan to paint any incoming asteroids. Apparently the solar wind would thus exert more force on it and divert it out of it's course, if caught far out enough. Not completely sure how serious / plausible it is.
And if all else fails... how old is Bruce Willis??
If there was an object this size anywhere close we would have spotted it by now.
As a comparison the larger moon of Mars is Phobos. This according to Wikipedia (yeah I know) is 27 × 22 × 18 km so is smaller but was discovered back in 1877.
Also from the Wiki, "Near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs, are asteroids that have orbits that pass close to that of Earth. Asteroids that actually cross the Earth's orbital path are known as Earth-crossers. As of May 2010, 7,075 near-Earth asteroids are known and the number over one kilometre in diameter is estimated to be 500–1,000."
These are all being tracked and all have (currently) safe orbits.
I definately take your point about the smaller things though, the Chelyabinsk meteor was around 20m across and stuff like this is very hard to spot, small and VERY dark and non reflecting. One of these in the wrong place would be very inconvenient.
"The only reason there is not a huge concern about such an event is because people are bad with figures."
Really? I would say the opposite. We are bad with figures, therefore we grossly overestimate the threat. Humans toss the word 'million' around casually without registering how vast it is. We happily turn the stupidly huge into something trite and worry about grossly improbable things, instead of worrying about the far-more-probable.
Looking at a thousand years of future, we'd be astronomically unlucky to get hit with a rock that big: A millions to one chance, even without the consideration that there were a lot more space rocks floating around our solar system 3 billion years ago.
The problem then is not us being bad at numbers, but bad at risk assessment. The odds are stupidly long, but it's essentially 'game over' for humanity. We should keep an eye out for big rocks not because of how likely they are (they aren't) but how devastating they will be. That's almost another problem though: they will be so potentially catastrophic that civilisation is likely to be knocked on its ass. Hence: There won't be any economy, hence no profit, hence it's not something large organisations have an active interest in. If everyone will be screwed afterwards and the odds are long, why financially disadvantage in the current timeframe yourself to ward against a threat that won't materialise.
Poor risk assessment skills and greed are the main issues, not being bad at numbers.
You misunderstood me. I was saying the exact same thing as you. There is a small probability in your day to day life that you will suddenly die, but you get life insurance if you have a family because as remote (seeming) the chance, the consequences of not having insurance are too severe to bear.
In terms of probability, I expect it is improbable that a planet killer will strike in my lifetime, but It is not far off even money that a nasty one will.
The risk is huge. In fact, the risk is entirely unbearable. It would take a hell of an impact to destroy life, but not nearly as severe an impact to destroy civilization and likely our species. There is a finite chance of extinction and it would not be that expensive to give us a chance to at least escape extinction.
As for the probability that we have an 'event', well ... if it happens the probability is 1. We don't understand what creates the risk well enough to put a good number on it. Our long quiet period may be aberrant and end at any time. My reckoning that the probability of a very bad strike could just be an optimistic hunch.
We know there are rocks in space and we know that we have been hit by rocks from space and we can be fairly certain we will be hit again. Some of those hits can be very bad. Beyond that we don't know nearly enough to have much confidence in any estimate.
My point stands that we spend all sorts of money on other things. The marginal final 20 billion dollars of U.S. Military budget probably does less good with the military than it would on a project to get early warning of Armageddon.
Note: Don't have the military do this. They will spend most of the money figuring out how to weaponize the phenomenon.
Panspermia requires a small rock that slows quickly so that any life in it is not fried by the fuck off explosion, the shock waves sufficient to destroy some of natures hardest crystals and the following world wide firestorm.
Well that and a complete lack of perspective.
no one know what Panspermia requires.
3.6B years ago life started on earth. no one knows why.
3.6B years ago, a massive 'thing' hit earth.
there is insufficient evidence to conclude Panspermia is not possible in this scenario I would suggest.
I am not a 'believer'. I am simply stating that your premise is unproven.
The hard thing about life is getting it started. Panspermia merely adds getting off a planet, a few hundred light years of interstellar travel, and landing again without being destroyed to the problem of starting life in the first place. As a theory it laughs in the face of Occams razor and comes out looking like his noodlyness in pico-denier manifestation mode as a result.
Panspermia has its origins in intellectual laziness and deserves the same respect that making Pi 3 so the really stupid can calculate the wheel sizes for mechanical calculators.
The hard thing about life is getting it started
Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it's a virtual inevitability, given a planet continuously covered in liquid water for a few tens or hundreds of millions of years. There's only one instance of life known to us at present, and you cannot calculate anything about the likelyhood of an event from a single datum.
However, one can observe that life started within a few hundred million years of the formation of this planet, and closer still to the later time when Earth developed stable oceans that weren't periodically boiled or vaporised. So life got started fairly quickly compared to the length of time it's been running for.
The same cannot be said of multicellular life. It may be that almost every planet in a habitable zone around a star is covered in slime, that only one in a million has multicellular organisms, and that we are currently the only intelligent life in our galaxy. But that's also speculation - only one datum, from which it's hard to make deductions about the likelyhood of life of any sort.
> no it wasn't. that's the rough age of EARTH! it WAS around 3.6 million years ago.
stu4,
let us take another look at the article, shall we?
"the scientists behind the paper think they have found evidence of a massive impact between 3.23 billion and 3.47 billion years ago"
that is billion years as in BEEELION years in El Reg terms or maybe even BEEEEEEEEEEEELION years, as that is quite a few billion years and certainly longer than the lifespan of my computer's operating system (which has just suffered an extinction event).
impactor of that size would cause what is known as crustal tsunami. would just crush all underground shelters as it traveled around the globe
But life at that time was single-celled organisms living in oceans. Provided the water around them didn't vaporise or get hot enough to kill them, they'd survive with no trouble at all. An impact like his could sterilize all life on land and within rocks, but deepwater life away from the impact site would stay safe.
Actually the formation they've studied is rather famous for containing microfossils which prove life was already around and thriving 3 point something billion years ago. Certainly *before* that hit, since the microfossils already were present in the then-rock , and were not melted away in the firestorm.
The article, and the geological description of the rocks elsewhere mention shear ruptures which then were filled up by local melt.. that blast was *hot* ....The fireball would have sterilised the "immediate" surroundings, but the effects on the rest of life on the globe could well have been not as devastating as you'd think. You're talking about a time when continents were *just* beginning to form ( that rock structure is one of the old platelets that survived.), and the earth was basically a large ocean dotted with some landmasses, punctuated by * lots* of volcanism. There also was a hell of a lot more debris hanging around in the solar system, so meteorite strikes were rather common then, even big(gish) ones.
Life present at the time obviously was able to cope with it, else we would not be around, we're talking about our furthest ancestors, after all. Life at the time would have been, and *must* have been, resilient enough to take a bit of a scalding and a beating. So in the end the impact probably would have seriously inconvenienced local species, but for the rest of the world, it would simply have registered as "a bit more of the hot red stuff, the neighbourhood is really turning into a slum nowadays, don't you think?"
Moment Magnitude's more scientifically accurate, but someone needs to bring that to congress. Because at the moment you'll find nearly all of the emergency preparedness and response documentation on the subject to refer to the Richter scale for clarity of communication with the public, with even USGS using it on public documents. Its kind of annoying really.
"at least three times as massive"
Erm... comparison chart shows the size difference to be 10Km wide Vs 30Km wide. That's a tripling in one direction only. Assuming the asteroids were roughly circular and of comparable composition, then the MASS would be roughly 9 times larger. And thus "nine times as massive"
to be fair he did say 'circular' not 'spherical'....
Yes, some scientists have suggested the object was in fact a gigantic Space Frisbee[citation needed].
"Are there any mass extinction events around this time that corroborate this?"
As someone else pointed out, we as a species don't seem to be very good with big numbers.
The margin of error in the estimate as to when this happened is four times longer than the time between now and the dinosaur extinction event.
Maybe readers here are simply too used to prefix multipliers. When did you last actually try to visualise a Gigabyte other than to whinge that it's not enough RAM never mind space on an SD card. :-)
To get a little perspective, this event occurred "only" about 3.5 Gigayears ago.
Are there any mass extinction events around this time that corroborate this?
Is there an iridium or ash layer like chickycluxal?
No, because it was too long ago. 3400 My compared to 60My. Erosion and subduction will have long ago destroyed the macro-structure.
However, there will be special minerals such as shocked quartz that can only be generated by extreme pressure waves. And it may not be complete coincidence that the impact site seems to have been where we now find some of the the richest Platinum-group-metal-containing rocks on the planet.
try this:
"The impacting body, which could have been an asteroid or a comet, was between 4015 and 6285 double decker buses wide and hit the Earth at more than 600 times the official speed limit on English roads, with a minimum 5 year prison sentence and automatic disqualification. The impact would have caused a crater around 54000 double decker buses across and the resulting tsunamis would have been tens of thousands of linguine high."
The impacting body, which could have been an asteroid or a comet, was between 264285.7143 and 414285.7143 Linguine wide and hit the Earth at 0.6671% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum. The impact would have caused a crater around 54235.8173 Double-decker buses across and the resulting tsunamis would have been thousands of Chuck Norris's high.
...the dinosaurs weren't very bright, and rather nasty to boot, AND, that humans are a bit brighter, and slightly less nasty, can we find a correlation between 'size/cleverness/nastiness'?
So, the bigger you are, the dumber you are, and the nastier you are. Conversely, the smaller you are, the more intelligent you are, and the nicer you are.
There is a myth that man's main purpose and imperative is the propagation of the species. That might have been true once, but now we have pornhub and overpopulation, it's a new day. BFO rocks flying about at speed through space, and all it will take is one whopper to do for us all. No more pornhub!
If man was truly still directed by the imperative of the propagation of the species, would he not be doing something to mitigate against this albeit low probability, but high significance event? So he can keep on watching pornhub?
But let's assume the human species just ain't no god damned good in the universal scheme of things and God's holy eyes, just like those nasty brutish and dumb dinosaurs were. And so he has to go. What next? Now, assuming that man is basically along the lines of a cross between a rat and a pig (some people are more like rats, others more like pigs, others again resembling both) in the macroscopic scale of things, can we assume than another animal another order of magnitude smaller than us again is prepped to take over? The Ants! The Bees! And mutant variations there of when all the spent nuclear fuel gets released into the biosphere and birth defects and darwinism take over. Give it a few hundred thousand years, say.
So, now what we have, assuming our correlation is correct, is smaller, more intelligent, nicer creatures. God is having another shot at it. Saying to himself/herself 'Let's see how much I fuck it up again this time'.
There are no laws of the Universe that says this can't happen. They can evolve intelligently more and more and considering that they already have the cooperation genes built in, they would have a head start in the long term game compared to us dumber and nastier less cooperative souls.
They could build and evolve the structures that they are already used to building. Think of a termite mound but in the shape of the Burj Al Khalifa, built with stronger and more eco friendly materials, and populated by more worthy inhabitants.
Sure, they might not reinvent the wheel, or the TV or the internet, but they might have no need of it, already having other communication systems in place. In the same way that they might not even need aeroplanes, already being able to fly. They might develop things we could not even dream of.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Just a silly thought.
Then again, at that macroscopic scale, they'd be pretty buggered if they did want to cooperate and build an anti-asteroid shield, I suppose. Maybe we are God's chosen few after all. Let's not fuck this up as well. Remember, no life, no internet, no pornhub!
Your statement "Conversely, the smaller you are, the more intelligent you are, and the nicer you are" simply isn't true.
A scorpion is pretty small, pretty dumb and not very nice. Fire ants fall into the same category.
"So, now what we have, assuming our correlation is correct, is smaller, more intelligent, nicer creatures. "
-- please refrain from making further assumptions.
You're probably right!
I hadn't really thought it through.
I shall refrain.
Desist.
And stfu.
But I can dream can't I?
(Anyway, if you're going to be clever about it, virii are even smaller than scorpions, certainly not as clever, and a whole lot nastier)
:-)
In a brave new world. With just a handful of virii. They'll start -They'll start all over again - all over again - all over again - all over again...
the dinosaurs weren't very bright, and rather nasty to boot
You've got a time machine to hand?
Dinosaurs are still with us. We call them "birds". The big flightless ones all died out. The small flying ones didn't.
Of non-human intelligences on the planet, parrots and crows have to come pretty high up the list. Parrots have the verbal abilities of a human toddler, and that's speaking in human language. Some crows make tools (a step up from just using found tools). Considering that their brains are constrained to be so small, that's even more impressive.
So big dinosaurs might have been scarily smart critters. We'll never know (short of finding some 60My-old fossil tools made by intelligent 'saurs! ).
As for nasty, that's plain silly. Some were carnivores. So are many humans. They evolved to be carnivores, like tigers or killer whales. With humans, that's chosen behaviour.
Well, I wasn't being entirely serious. Just rapping on a muse, man.
I've heard that theory about the birds being the modern day dinosaurs. I suppose they had to come from somewhere. They lay eggs. Not sure where the whole reptile thing comes into it, but if people more knowledgeable than me say it is so, I'll believe them, until I maybe one day do my own research and come to another conclusion.
As for the crows. I know. Fascinating creatures. They can talk you know? Only one or two words, but still, very impressive. Even my dog can't do that. Well, apart from 'sausages'. I watch the little buggers around here sometimes. Magnificent creatures. They occasionally have a little sortie where an invading party of about 10 or so swoop down. There is a commander of course. He's the big black burly bastard with the beak. There is a scout looking out for protection. A few underlings being trained up in the art of warfare. They collect bits of material for their nest. When they find something suitable, they put it to one side in a pile, go and gather some more, then when they have what they need, they pick it all up and fly off. They are like the SAS, they just get in, then they get out. This all takes about five minutes. They don't hang about.
But the talking thing is still more impressive. In our language. Of course they have their own language. I can hear them screaming/communicating now. Haven't a clue what they are saying. But it is a structured language of that I have no doubt. Crows have a very hierarchical system as far as I can tell from observing them from around here. Beyond the family unit, I mean. They really are like a little army.
You must have seen that viral viddy on utubez with the crow on the snow covered slanty roof, using a jar lid or somesuch to skate down, and then he would pick it back up again, go to the top, skate back down. Hilarious. You can fly, but you think it might just be fun to 'play' for a while doing something a bit different. That is where learning comes from. Curiosity. Exploration. Higher intelligence.
Anyway, I didn't mean to malign the dinosaurs. There may have indeed been some nice ones. And maybe they did have an intelligence far more advanced than we suspect or are able to detect. It is entirely possible that one or two even made their way around to a bit of tool use. We shall never know.
And apologies for calling them nasty. You are right again. That's just where they were at on the evolutionary scale of things. Being carnivorous as opposed to the many herbivorous ones around, needing to eat meat was a problem only really solved by killing other animals for their flesh. Nothing personal. Where as with humans as you so duly note, it is a choice we make. There are alternatives for most people. I exercise that choice, personally speaking.
But it is not just the eating of animals for food and sustenance that makes man nasty. I think that can be forgiven. Evolution wise we have come a long way very quickly, a little bit too quickly in fact, which is why we are at the point we are at now and having the problems we are having now as a species. No, the eating of meat is still understandable. But the mistreatment and torture of animals for fun and profit is not. I doubt the dinosaurs ever engaged in any such behaviour. Hell, we even torture those of our own species purely for fun. Yes, there are good among us. Many. But I can't help feeling that whatever comes after homo sapiens is going to have to be an improvement. Who knows.
Either Man is going to travel to the stars and find new homes. Evolve. Or he is not. We have another few thousand million years to figure it out. Well, not really that long. The next Ice Age, soon to be upon us is going to be a right bugger. That will sort the men from the boys. But being optimistic...
And what is Man planning in mitigation for this next Ice Age? Nothing as far as I can tell. Man has no vision beyond maybe a few generations down the line where his legacy will still be felt. Pictures on the wall of 10 generations of sons.
There is no cooperation of the species. Man is clever. Certainly too clever for his own good. But not as clever as he thinks.
Man should start getting it together. A good project would be the detection and obliteration of asteroids/meteors. He can go on murdering and slaughtering his fellow Man in the meantime. But it would be a start. (I have no worries about a big rock from space landing on my head, btw.)
Like they say in Game of Thrones - "Winter is soon to be upon us".
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