Was there a major meteoritic strike 13,000 years ago in North America?
That wasn’t very long ago (compared to, say, the sixty-five million years ago that the Yucatan was hit). Evidence continues to accumulate that we get hit a lot more than people have previously imagined. We really need to develop the capability to do something about it. We have technology in hand to do so, but apparently lack the will to deploy it. This by itself is reason enough to make the investment to become a real spacefaring civilization, but pork and maintaining existing jobs remain more important.
Non-NYT link – http://www.physorg.com/news150097682.html
I don’t like to have to register to read an article.
The worst administration in the history of the
United States had far more interest in
the Ares, annoying the russians and
attacking Iraq then on doing things
like trying to deal with the threats of
asteroids or Category 5 hurricanes headed
at New Orleans
Just once in a while, “jack lee,” could you attempt to put up a comment that isn’t ignorant and stupid?
Hmmm… I guess this is almost on-topic, if you squint.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20090102/pl_bloomberg/aovrno0oj41g
I only see one new data point in the entire thing… the rest is rehash and spin. But, if rumors are running around that Ares may get trashed and replaced with Delta/Atlas… I consider that at least a silver lining.
All FEMA documents prior to Katrina said: Local resources are responsible for stabilizing the situation for the first 5 days. The Federal FEMA response made that time line. The really bad stuff all happened during the time the local city and state were supposed to be responsible. Why does Bush get 100% of the blame and the democratic mayor and governor get a pass?
It took much longer for FEMA to respond to Andrew, yet the local Florida response was adequate until FEMA responded the local FL government was responsible, the New Orleans government was incompetent, inept and corrupt.
Why does Bush get 100% of the blame and the democratic mayor and governor get a pass?
Because idiots like “jack lee” suffer from Bush-Derangement Syndrome, and have to turn every post into an opportunity to whine and cry about him. I wonder what they’ll do when he’s not president any more?
“The worst administration in the history of the
United States had far more interest in
the Ares, annoying the russians and
attacking Iraq then on doing things
like trying to deal with the threats of
asteroids or Category 5 hurricanes headed
at New Orleans”
Jack, you surely must have gotten an F at History. James Earl Carter’s administration did none of the above.
Either that or you are just ‘Jacking-Off’ on Rand’s board again.
Interesting timing, that’s during the ending of the last ice age too. Might have contributed by reducing the albedo (darkening) of the ice fields and glaciers.
Meanwhile, returning to the subject, I bought a book last year via Amazon on this very subject. The title is “The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes” and subtitled “How a Stone Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture” and the authors are Richard Firestone, Alan West, and Simon Warwick-Smith.
The cover of the trade paperback is pure moonbat, but don’t let it stop you from getting a copy, because what is inside is original science at it’s very best.
The recent news stories are from others who are hopping on the bandwagon and apparently neglecting to credit Firestone, West, and Warwick-Smith.
I blame the “Not Invented Here” syndrome.
Hmm, well, I take it we all realize the date of the last impact tells you exactly nothing about how frequent they are. The relevant measure is the time between impacts.
It’s interesting to see catastrophism making a bit of a comeback in the new century. Some kind of millenarianism?
“…pork and maintaining existing jobs remain more important.”
Which begs the question, at which stage of a civilization’s development does it become economically and sociologically desirable to incur the expenses of interstellar travel to come to Earth for an*l probing of its resident life forms?
Especially when such a civilization can’t be certain its wide-ranging investigators of probative questioning will arrive at their intended destination when all those resident life forms are still “distracted by pork and the maintaining of existing jobs, or less.”
I hope we can get back on topic for natural disasters, asteroidal or otherwise.
Geologists on a Web site told us to forget about asteroids, the five big disasters looming for the Continental U.S. are
1) The Big One that puts L.A. in the Pacific Ocean,
2) The Big One that puts Seattle into Puget Sound,
3) The Big One that puts Memphis into the Mississipi River,
4) The tsunami that takes out the East Coast of Florida,
and (drum roll and trumpet fanfare)
5) The Yellowstone caldera volcano that buries the entire continental U.S. eastward.
My main concern is the Big One that puts Memphis into the Mississipi river — that is this New Madrid fault business. The Yellowstone deal is one of these one in a million year happenings. We are “due” for the New Madrid Fault, which happens every 150 years — yeah, yeah, I know about the statistical fallacy of a rare event not being any more likely because it hasn’t happened on a string of years, but there is such a thing as strain building up in the rocks when a fault hasn’t moved in so many years.
The Big One that Eats Memphis apparently rumbles much farther than the California quakes owing to something about differences in how the ground rocks are layered. I am figuring that the Memphis Big One will do damage here in Wisconsin on the order of the Northridge quake, and my friend who rode out that one said it trashed his condo — tipping over bookshelves and emptying out his kitchen cabinets on to the floor.
Here is the problem or question I want to pose to the “guys” on this forum. My wife does not want any kind of latches on the kitchen cabinets; I want to install some kind of latches (Popular Mechanics had some good suggestions with regard to magnetic, roller latches, although some Californians suggest these kind of positive-locking “childproof” catches, although my wife would regard those as a drastic inconvenience in the kitchen for a rare earthquake event).
What is the best way to advocate for seismic preparedness here in Wisconsin? Again, my estimate is that if I can ride out a Northridge-level shaking by bolting bookshelves to the studs, adding kitchen cabinet latches, bolting the computer to the computer table so it doesn’t roll over, and so on, I can save myself a lot of grief in the next 20-30 years. Ideas?
Funny how the object of most concern just happens to be in the speakers own discipline. Trust a geologist to cite earthquakes and an astronomer to look to the heavens.
You have to listen/read most (or all if you can) and make up your own mind.
Paul M:
What about the Azores sliding into the ocean, creating a tidal wave that will wash up against the Alleghenies?
If you timed that w/ the Yellowstone caldera going, which would probably occur with a blow elsewhere in the Ring of Fire, you could finally remove Amerikkka as the source of all the world’s ills!
That might assuage the Jack Lee’s of this world?
What about the Azores sliding into the ocean, creating a tidal wave that will wash up against the Alleghenies?
I believe that is Paul’s number 4.
Here is the problem or question I want to pose to the “guys” on this forum. My wife does not want any kind of latches on the kitchen cabinets; I want to install some kind of latches (Popular Mechanics had some good suggestions with regard to magnetic, roller latches, although some Californians suggest these kind of positive-locking “childproof” catches, although my wife would regard those as a drastic inconvenience in the kitchen for a rare earthquake event).
My take is that some of these measures probably aren’t worth the marital bother at the moment, but it depends on where you are, if you can come up with other synergistic reasons, and blind luck.
The first question you need answered is how vulnerable is your house to earthquake damage. I think you’re right in assuming that a Madrid fault earthquake is the greatest danger though there are other faults out there. I know the USGS has made risk maps for most of the US. That can be useful in guessing your real risk.
The soil that your house sits on is important. If your house lies on a flood plain or filled in lakebed (water logged sand, silt, or clay), then you are at increased risk of damage in an earthquake. If it is on bedrock, the damage will probably be greatly reduced.
Second, while dishes falling off the shelves would be a real mess, the greater danger (IMHO) is large, heavy things like bookshelves tipping over. If you have a large bookshelf overlooking your bed (or other place people are likely to be) that is dangerous. Either move the bookshelf so it no longer overlooks the zone or reinforce the base of the shelf. These sorts of thing could tip over for other reasons than earthquakes, so it’s a good idea to take percautions.
Hmmm, you can put down rubber mats under your dishes. For example, there are mesh mats which don’t collect water (in case you put away wet dishes). That can help absorb some of the vibration and keep your dishes in place.
Finally, last time there were three big Madrid quakes. So first one will be a surprise, but not any subsequent quakes. Once the first one goes and you have some idea of how bad they can be in your region (assuming it reaches the magnitude 8 threshhold), you can plan how to protect against future quakes. Keep in mind that future quakes even of the same size and on the same fault system can have different effects on you. Diffraction effects can cause different areas to suffer especially severe damage or unusually light damage.
Finally, I think the frequency of quakes has been overstated. There might be big quakes every 150 years, but I think the big magnitude 8 quakes are much less frequent than that. Wikipedia claims 300-500 years which sounds about right to me. Still means we can get surprised by a magnitude 8 quake this week, but this fault system isn’t piling on the stress like the San Andreas fault system does.
Reading the article, the evidence for an extraterrestrial cause of the extinctions seems tenuous at best. The layer of diamond particles is intriguing, but it seems that an impact in North America just 12,000 years ago capable of wiping out all large creatures would leave a lot more clues including an unmistakable large smoking crater somewhere on the continent. Until more evidence is produced the principle of Occam’s razor would seem to indicate the mega fauna extinctions were indeed caused by early Native Americans. The Clovus may have met the same fate as the mammoths — simply overwhelmed by technically and culturally superior later immigrants.
While I’m skeptical, I’ll keep an open mind and wait for more evidence to emerge.
The claim is that the object was a low density comet and wouldn’t have left a crater.
The claim is that the object was a low density comet and wouldn’t have left a crater.
They’re also hedging their bets by bringing up the possibility that the comet fragmented into several pieces before it hit, which is quite plausible.
Remember, too, that if there was a single large impact, it might well have been smack in the middle of the Laurentide ice sheet, which was a couple of miles thick in some places. If the object did punch a hole all the way into bedrock, the crater could be at the bottom of Hudson Bay or Lake Michigan.
t’s interesting to see catastrophism making a bit of a comeback in the new century. Some kind of millenarianism?
No, government science funding. Find a likely disaster to avert in your discipline and you can sell it to the grant boards. Subsidize something and you get a surplus.
I’m beginning to think that Reagan’s chance to science funding, that it must be connected to something useful, was a bad idea.
Mr. Milenkovic, you missed one out; and it’s one that can be prevented by the proper action – as an asteroid strike could be, of course, if certain people cease to deliberately obstruct space access in order to preserve the Dominion (would once have been the Co-Dominion) and their own featherbedded jobs.
#6; the Big One that vapourises Manhattan Island. It is also true that this is overwhelmingly more likely in the short term than any of the disaster scenarios presented on this thread so far, and it is also true that it’s preventable – by fairly simple means, at that. It is also true, albeit with less certainty, that the actions necessary to prevent asteroid strikes would serve to make this one less likely as a side effect. I won’t go into the reasons, which have been done to death.
Incidentally, the same causes as in my #6 are also capable of making the Cumbre Vieja disaster much more likely. This scenario has even been presented in fiction, if only in a trashy mass-market paperback.
One last thing; I have to admit that the sudden disappearance of Manhattan Island would not trouble me much. After all, part of the population (at least during the day) of that island are the greedy SOBs that devastated the entire world economy chasing bonuses, and I don’t know anyone who lives or works there. However, as a Brit I would be somewhat concerned if #6 happened to Birmingham, England instead.
I have to admit that recent events have probably increased the perceived likelihood in the near-ish future of your #5, the Yellowstone caldera letting rip. All the people that have spent the last forty years obstructing space access would then be suitably rewarded for their efforts. Unfortunately, so would the rest of the world’s population – who had nothing to do with it.
How often do we get hit? The meteor crater in northern AZ happened about 50,000 years ago I’ve read.
This database shows others…
http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/Age.html
Six in the last 4,000 would be the number of the beast 666. Not that it means anything, it just popped up when I was trying to get an idea of frequency.
Remember, too, that if there was a single large impact, it might well have been smack in the middle of the Laurentide ice sheet, which was a couple of miles thick in some places. If the object did punch a hole all the way into bedrock, the crater could be at the bottom of Hudson Bay or Lake Michigan.
I don’t know, such a scenario sounds fishy to me. If the comet, or fragments of the comet, weren’t big enough to reach bedrock through the ice then it would have mostly resulted in massive amounts of steam being released which would have quickly dissipated. If the fragments were large enough reach bedrock there should be tell tale signs of such a fresh strike — even at the bottom of lakes or bays which have been mapped with sounding equipment.
It seems entirely possible that the team has indeed uncovered some evidence of a North American comet strike, but are over estimating the effects of the impact and underestimating the impact of the human inhabitants.
The team seems to be describing an event similar to the Tungaska explosion which left more of a depression than a crater, but spread over an area 100’s to 1000’s of times bigger across a substantial portion of North America. If Tunguska produced traces of nano-diamonds I would believe their scenario as being more plausible, but I have never heard of such findings from Tunguska. I don’t think an air explosion would produce enough pressure to create nano-diamonds from carbon in the comet.
It’s said that Hudson’s Bay is still rebounding from the weight of the ice sheet it carried, and it is pretty circular. [/moonbat]