Re: [meteorite-list] Contact! - OT - ish
A LOT of stars. I'm not in a figuring mood; just get yourself zeroes, bucket of, one (1). D. Keep your fingers off that Big Red Button... Is every species as dumb as we are? Hard to believe. After fifty years, we (meaning the West) seem to have learned about playing with these really dangerous toys. Now, all we have to is convince Iran, and North Korea, and... E. Global warming...? Don't be silly. F. Of the four terrestrial planets we know of, the Earth has the most water. The argument that terrestrial planets should be drowning in water seems like special pleading cooked up for the occasion. G., H., et cetera. Oh, heck, the rest are just excuses, really. They're really all just excuses. MAYBE it's intelligent life that's really rare. Since it took almost five billion years for it to pop up on this planet, you could reasonably argue that it's the bottleneck in the Drake equation. Five billion years to evolve intelligence, you could also argue reasonably, that it's essentially a matter of chance that it evolves at all. IF intelligence is only an accident, it might well be that the average time to evolve intelligence is longer than the lifetime of a star! That would sure cut N down to size... You could calculate the likelihood of intelligent life this way: cellular life has existed on Earth for roughly 90% of its lifetime; multi-cellular life has existed on Earth for roughly 10% of its lifetime; intelligent (well, more or less) life has existed on Earth for roughly 1/1000th of 1% of its lifetime. Therefore, intelligent life exists for 1/100,000th of the life of a life-bearing planet. That reduces factor-sub-i from 0.01 to 0.1. If additionally, you reduce the lifetime of technical civilizations and their dangerous toys to a few centuries, that really chops old N down to size! (How many times do I have to tell you to stay away from The Big Red Button?) Rob suggests that it is possible that once a technical civilization becomes advanced enough, it is virtually immortal. Arthur Clarke suggested the same thing. Pleasant thought. We all like that immortality talk. We like it more and more the older we get... Futurist Ray Kurzweil just wrote a book (The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology) suggesting mankind is about to evolve into super-organic-inorganic immortality. Hey! You can sign me up for the silicon; I'm ready to chip out... So, the Universe (the Heavens) is filled with wise immortals? Ever notice how many scientific notions end up sounding a lot like religious ones? These Wise Immortals have Wings? Harps? Look like Buddha? Never Mind... I'm just naturally suspicious... So, the many intelligent lifeforms in our Galactic neighborhood, taking note of our commencement of the use of EM technology, have imposed a ban on radio spectrum signals within 100 lightyears of Earth, the restricted zone to expand at the rate of one lightyear per year until further notice. Nothing permitted but tachyon traffic. Do you have any idea of what that will do to our operating budget? It's totally unfair for us to have to bear the burden of those costs just because some... some... Monkeys. Monkeys? Yes, monkeys. I know... Who would have thought it? OK, just because some monkeys have gotten smart all of a sudden. I mean, not to mention having to mothball all that equipment... Why should we get stuck with it? There's an 80% tax credit on both capital and operating cost over-runs. In that case... No problem! On the other hand, if WE are it, the only ones, the sole representative of intelligence in the Galaxy, maybe, just maybe, it might prove to be an incentive to GROW UP, fer cryin' outloud!! Why don't you monkeys stop carrying all that BS around with you and ACT like intelligent life once in a while. I know, it's hard... Here's what I suggest: just PRETEND you're the only wise aliens in the Galaxy and do what you think the only intelligent Galactic life, in all its wisdom, would do. Maybe, after a while, it would get to be a habit... Sterling K. Webb -- PS: That last comment not addressed to any Poster nor Member of the List, naturally; just to Humanity In General... --- - Original Message - From: Matson, Robert [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 1:48 PM Subject: RE: [meteorite-list] Contact! - OT - ish Hi Mark, N = N* fp ne fl fi fc Fl (The Drake Equation) I've always enjoyed jiggering with the numbers in the Drake equation; unfortunately, most of the parameters are completely unknown and so whatever value you choose is a complete guess. Here's my w.a.g. at parameter values (vs. yours in parentheses): N* represents the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy N* = 500 billion (100 billion) (Btw, that's American billion, not British billion). The actual number of stars
Re: [meteorite-list] Study Confirms 2003 UB313 Indeed Larger than Pluto
Yes! Please call them Dwarf Planets! Since almost every prediction and assumption about the objects in the Kuiper Belt for the last twenty years has proven to be diametrically in error, this will virtually guarantee that within a decade we'll discover a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt with a diameter in excess of 13,000 kilometers! (Bigger than the Earth.) Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 1:28 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Study Confirms 2003 UB313 Indeed Larger than Pluto http://space.com/scienceastronomy/060201_tenth_planet.html Study Confirms '10th Planet' Indeed Larger than Pluto ...One suggestion is to call the outer worlds dwarf planets. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Trojan Asteroid Patroclus: Comet in Disguise?
Hi, The really neat thing about this configuration is the view from the surface of (either) one looking toward the other. Unlike our puny Full Moon, which fills only 1/2 degree of the sky, the other binary would appear to loom in the sky spanning 10.67 degrees! 21 times the diameter of a Full Moon! Here is obviously the place to build the Honeymoon Hotel of the Future. Come to Patroclus! (Can't we do something about that name?) Depending on the rotational period of each object, the full lunar cycle would repeat every few days. But, if you get nervous about things falling on you, you might not want to vacation someplace where there's a world hanging in the sky, obviously ready to drop... I guess the 76-mile one is the world and the 70-mile one is the moon. Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 6:48 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Trojan Asteroid Patroclus: Comet in Disguise? http://www.keckobservatory.org/news/science/060201_patroclus/index.html Trojan Asteroid Patroclus: Comet in Disguise? the larger piece is 122 kilometer (76 miles) wide at its largest point, and the similar-sized partner is 112 kilometers (70 miles). The two pieces orbit their center of mass every four days, separated by a distance of about 680 kilometers (423 miles). __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Dust Found in Earth Sediment Traced to Breakup ofAsteroid 8.2 Million Years Ago
Hi, All, Not wanting to be too skeptical, jaded, or cynical here, but when this story first came out, I Googled for papers on the timing of the Veritas breakup and found there was a number of papers on the subject of computer modeling the time scale, all done before this discovery. None of them were able to do more than describe the breakup as recent, although one swallowed hard and allowed as how it might be within the last 50,000,000 years! Now we have a geological detection of an iridium spike in sediments at 8,200,000 years and a co-lateral computer model shows the breakup occured, no, when? 8.2 million years ago, exactly!! That's amazing... Exactly how did we refine the results of computer models from maybe 50,000,000 years to 8.2 million years in a single bound? Especially since that amounts to an increase of precision of roughly 1000-fold? Gee, just lucky, I guess... Wonder what was wrong with all those other computer models? Also, interesting is that the same team that did these computer models published in 2002 dating the breakup of the Karin asteroidal family at 5.8 million years, but there doesn't seem to be a spike in iridium in sediments at 5.8 million years. Wonder why not? Unless, of course, the 8.2 million year old spike is not from the Veritas breakup, but the Karin breakup which was mis-dated by 40% or so, a result to be expected in long-term regression software. It's floating-point error, you know, amazing how it builds up! The best orbital computer had a mountain of specially build LSI boards able to handle 80 to 100 digit accuracy in hardware not software, but even it got wobbly in only a few hundred million years and Venus started wandering around the Solar System! Just seems like a huge co-incidence... Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 2:54 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Dust Found in Earth Sediment Traced to Breakup ofAsteroid 8.2 Million Years Ago http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12787.html Dust Found in Earth Sediment Traced to Breakup of the Asteroid Veritas 8.2 Million Years Ago Caltech News Release Contact: Robert Tindol (626) 395-3631 [EMAIL PROTECTED] January 18, 2006 PASADENA, Calif.--In a new study that provides a novel way of looking at our solar system's past, a group of planetary scientists and geochemists announce that they have found evidence on Earth of an asteroid breakup or collision that occurred 8.2 million years ago. Reporting in the January 19 issue of the journal Nature, scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and Charles University in the Czech Republic show that core samples from oceanic sediment are consistent with computer simulations of the breakup of a 100-mile-wide body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The larger fragments of this asteroid are still orbiting the asteroid belt, and their hypothetical source has been known for years as the asteroid Veritas. Ken Farley of Caltech discovered a spike in a rare isotope known as helium 3 that began 8.2 million years ago and gradually decreased over the next 1.5 million years. This information suggests that Earth must have been dusted with an extraterrestrial source. The helium 3 spike found in these sediments is the smoking gun that something quite dramatic happened to the interplanetary dust population 8.2 million years ago, says Farley, the Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry at Caltech and chair of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. It's one of the biggest dust events of the last 80 million years. Interplanetary dust is composed of bits of rock from a few to several hundred microns in diameter produced by asteroid collisions or ejected from comets. Interplanetary dust migrates toward the sun, and en route some of this dust is captured by the Earth's gravitational field and deposited on its surface. Presently, more than 20,000 tons of this material accumulates on Earth each year, but the accretion rate should fluctuate with the level of asteroid collisions and changes in the number of active comets. By looking at ancient sediments that include both interplanetary dust and ordinary terrestrial sediment, the researchers for the first time have been able to detect major dust-producing solar system events of the past. Because interplanetary dust particles are so small and rare in sediment-significantly less than a part per million-they are difficult to detect using direct measurements. However, these particles are extremely rich in helium 3, in comparison with terrestrial materials. Over the last decade, Ken Farley has measured helium 3 concentrations in sediments formed over the last 80 million years to create a record of the interplanetary dust flux. To assure
Re: [meteorite-list] Suspected Meteorite Being Sent for Test inBangladesh
Hi, A touchstone is a piece of slate, fine-grained, used to test the purity of purported gold in ancient times, up to the XIXth century when chemical tests began. See: http://www.pamp.ch/gold_c/Info_site/in_glos/in_glos_touchstone.html Google, always Google! Presumably, the rock was heavy in density, dark in colour, and without obvious texture or inclusions. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Darren Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 11:58 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Suspected Meteorite Being Sent for Test inBangladesh On Wed, 1 Feb 2006 11:33:12 -0800 (PST), you wrote: Weighing 2.5 kg the triangular shape material looked like a mortar shell. But goldsmiths said it seemed to be a costly live touchstone. Okay, is this some sort of translation problem? What is a costly live touchstone? __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Trojan Asteroid Patroclus: Comet in Disguise?
Doug! You're Hired! As Head of Advertising and Creative Visioneering for TwoWorlds Resorts (formerly Patroclus Properties, Ltd., but now a whole-owned susidiary of Solar Disney, S.A.) PowerPoint Presentation for the Board of Directors on Monday? Sterling --- - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 1:48 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Trojan Asteroid Patroclus: Comet in Disguise? Hola Sterling!, List! Nice to see you back posting some whimsically plausible astronomy again, so as to prevent some of us (one of us?) from getting stir crazy. If I were a developer eyeing the Patroclus system, I would go all out for the awe inspiration and shameless marketing,, How about adding some vision to your plan? Instead of a mere ten degree single moon standard Missouri position, I propose we put the hotel instead at the metastable center of gravity of the two body system. Now you get to be in the middle of two irregular shaped planetoids, both tumbling around you FILLING 20 DEGREES OF ARC EACH, for double the pleasure. That would be forty full moons in apparent diameter a piece, under continuoius view. Promo: Your glass house awaits you! Be naughty and indulge your seetheart this Valentine's Day. Wedge yourselves in between two of the solar system's most beautiful heavenly bodies and experience celestial harmony like in no other place. Rich? Think the world revolves around you? Think again! Be the first on your block with bragging rights of a loving evening with two worlds revolving around you, in muted and flickering solar light. Your worlds even come in his and hers versions... FINE PRINT FOT THE CHESS CLUB: two for one geek-special during excessive black out dates where an eclipse can be a exciting as watching the Sun go behind floating mountains...free guided tour by Oriental Robotics programmed with sweet feminine voices to describe the simplicity of the Newtonian Compensating propulsion system...off the shelf piezo elements detect acceleration above the threshold setting and manipulate the reflective properties of the glass hotel hull utilizing the energy of the photons to maintain equilibrium. Extra charge to watch one of the Xenon ionic thrusters smoothly stabilize the hotels position for one of the rare ocassions when the major axis of one of the bodies aligns with the hotel's radial vector for a breathtaking view, and perturbs by resonance the hotel beyond the corrective capabilities of the reflective propulsion system... Saludos, Doug En un mensaje con fecha 02/02/2006 12:08:52 AM Mexico Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] escribe: Unlike our puny Full Moon, which fills only 1/2 degree of the sky, the other binary would appear to loom in the sky spanning 10.67 degrees! 21 times the diameter of a Full Moon! Here is obviously the place to build the Honeymoon Hotel of the Future. Come to Patroclus! (Can't we do something about that name?) __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Off Topic: No Danish expeditions in NWA for a longtime
Hi, Lars, Heard you lost another embassy today. Sorry. Seems the Arab multitude have found someone else beside the US to hate. I would like to say it may blow over, but we had this embassy trouble in Iran 27 years ago, and it hasn't blown over yet... Danes are fortunate that this is purely political theater stage-managed by the Syrian government, who organizes these things very well and sees to it that no one gets hurt, the embassies are close at the time, and so forth. They do an excellent job... And fortunate for the Syrians who badly needed something to distract the UN (and the world) from further investigating their murderous ways in having managed to annex Lebanon without having anybody notice that they did the same thing there that Iraq did in Kuwait and had, so far, gotten away with it. The real danger is not the these carefully arranged mob attacks, but a truly spontaneous mob somewhere in a Muslim country less well-tyranized than Greater Syria. Someone could get hurt. Of course, you can take comfort in the fact that ALL the Muslim countries seem to be thoroughly tyrannized... Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Lars Pedersen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2006 10:32 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Off Topic: No Danish expeditions in NWA for a longtime Hi List This is highly off topic, but I just had to get the anger off my chest... As you may know Denmark is very unpopular at the moment in all the arab world, because a newspaper brought 12 cartoons of Muhamed. Today demonstants just burned down the Danish embasy in Damaskus in Syria. (the Sweedish and Chile embasy were in the same building and burned down too) I guess Danes are banned in the whole area for a long time... Sorry for the off topic nature of the mail, but it may affect us all who knows Best Lars __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] 2003 UB313 Reignites a Planet-Sized Debate
to be a differentiated rock/ice body, and its axis is roughly upright, like a planet, 5 to 10 degrees. Ceres' surface is warmer than a bare body would be and it seems to have both a thin atmosphere and frost. So, only three traditional asteroids are in the running for planet-hood. Ceres is a Plutonian planet; Vesta is a Terrestrial planet; Hygeia, we don't know about.) Let's face it: politics is involved. The French are proud of LeVerrier for Neptune; let's forget that Vulcan idiocy. Is the US going to give up good old Clyde, the only American discoverer of a planet. My guess is NO! The discoverer of Ceres, Giuseppe Piazzi, thought his discovery was a comet! After months, he lost it behind the Sun. He sent his observations to other astronomers and gave up, not interested in a lousy comet. The next year, the great mathematician Gauss tested his new method of calculating an orbit on these odd observations, and he sent his calculation to two German astronomers, von Zach and Olbers (he of the paradox) who re-discovered Ceres AND announced it as a PLANET, which Piazzi never did. Thenafter, Ceres triggered the formulation of the Bode Law (which isn't really a law, it turns out, or is it?). It is interesting that Ceres was a planet for more than 50 years before it was dumped from the roster and left on the bench. It was just over 50 years from discovery that folks began to whisper about Pluto not really being our kind of planet. Most of the many discussions on internet astronomy boards about the meaning of planet are, I discover, fairly irrational. (The stupidest reason I found to be given for demoting Pluto from planet status, by the way, was that Pluto was boring...) I found therein numerous suggestions that ANY body composed largely of ice (40% or 50%) cannot be a planet, regardless of size, a view that oddly enough, seems to be echoed by many professionals in the field, a truly odd view, considering the large number of planet- sized bodies which ARE. Which brings us to that odd KBO, the big one that ISN'T round... 2003 EL61. It is not an ice body; it is not even a rock/ice body. It is a ROCK body, solid rock, like the Earth or Mercury or Venus or Mars. It has two moons (that we know of). If it were our neighbor, we would call it a Terrestrial planet without a second thought... except for one little bitty problem. You see, it's as big as Pluto... one way. But the other way, it's only 1/4 th as big as Pluto! That is, it has an equatorial axis that is four times the length of the polar axis, and another equatorial axis that is 2-3 times the length of the polar axis. That can only be described as Truly Weird. I know what we should name it: PANCAKE WORLD! How can it be called a planet if it's a damned pancake? Well, it's dynamically distorted. It had to be formed hot, molten just like the rest of the Terrestrial planets, but it was spinning so fast that it cooled and froze into the pancake shape. The puzzling thing is not the shape, but the question of how a hot molten Terrestrial body could have formed in the near- absolute-zero environment of the far outer Solar System? Perhaps it formed in the inner system like the Earth but got thrown out. Could the rapid revolution (a four-hour day) be the result of an immense orbit-changing collision? Maybe it's our long lost brother world... Another problem is that the term minor planet has been used for a century for the 100,000 asteroids! This pretty much renders it useless for the job of distinguishing big and small planets from each other, which we would prefer was a gentle distinction. As usual, the history of a terminology is completely entangled in the problem, to the extent that simple direct terms can no longer be used. Minor vs. Major? Planetoids vs. Planets? Planetinos vs. Planets? Because of sensitivity about terminology, the attempt to avoid saying what you meant creates a tangled spate of utterly silly and ridiculous terms, carefully disguised as highly technical and inoffensive language: KBO's, TNO's, not to mention Cubebinos, Plutinos, Two-tinos, SDO's --- Argh! Stop! Stop! How is that making things better? We all know what IAU will do. Nothing. Smart guys. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 1:25 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] 2003 UB313 Reignites a Planet-Sized Debate http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8681-xena-reignites-a-planetsized-debate.html Xena reignites a planet-sized debate Maggie McKee New Scientist 06 February 2006 The heated debate over what constitutes a planet has reignited following last week's confirmation that the most distant planet-like object object ever seen in the solar system is larger than Pluto. But astronomers tasked with settling the issue say the argument could
Re: [meteorite-list] 2003 UB313 Reignites a Planet-Sized Debate
Hi, Rob, Actually, Ceres contains almost 40% of the mass of the Belt. We used to think that Ceres constituted less of the mass, but it turns out that the Belt is deficient in the smallest sizes of asteroids predicted by the so-clled power law. Ceres is at that magic distance of 2.8 AU predicted by the Titus-Bode law, but the wholly pragmatic definition of the Belt that we use encompasses everything from outside Mars to inside Jupiter. That vast expanse covering 3.5 AU is hardly a viable definition of similar orbits. For similar, I favor that zone adjacent to a body's orbit, inside of which there is no orbit in which a similar body would be dynamically stable for the long (n x 10^9 years) term. In the case of asteroids, given the breakup time scale of various families, it's hard to call the central region where Ceres is long-term stable, I suspect largely due to Ceres' presence. The main mass of the Asteroid Belt is concentrated right where Ceres is (no coincidence). Ceres' mean distance is 414,000,000 km with Pallas at 415,000,000 km, Juno at 400,000,000 km, Vesta at 353,000,000 km, and Eunomia at 396,000,000 km, all big muthas, which total about 70% of Ceres' mass! If Ceres misses being 50% of the mass in Belt #1, Zone II, it doesn't miss it by much. As for some rocks, remember, it takes 1,000,000,000 (a billion) 1-km asteroids to mass up to Ceres, or a million 10-km asteroids. Size matters. For asteroids, at least... Pluto is actually a clearer case, mass-wise. It would take, geometrically, 11,648 100-km plutinos to equal Pluto mass. But, there's also a de-compensation of density to throw into the equation. I didn't do it (too lazy) but it would probably take 12,500 100-km plutinos to make a Pluto. 1400 is, like, no problemo... But the truth is that we Earthlings live in a neighborhood where rocks and rubble, asteroids and comets, satellites and smaller planets, are few, far between, or entirely absent. We regard it as normal to look out over our broad expanses of planetary space empty of any interesting features in the local landscape, like a vast green well-mowed lawn with no insects, no birds, no rabbits nor deer, no trees nor flower beds, no statues or birdbaths, and definitely no other people... Well, you get the idea. We are horrified at a few thousand NEA's and get all fluttery when a comet wanders by every decade or so. Provincial... It ISN'T normal. Ok, the Asteroid Belt is more cluttered and so is the Kuiper Belt than we're used to -- so what? ALL the outer system is cluttered; it's the inner system that's bare. In a solar system that's 80 AU across (at least), we're in the inner 3 AU, which has been swept abnormally clean and bare. Personally, I think it's because of that big STAR right in the middle of the place... It has warped our thinking. It SEEMS perfectly normal to demand that the 99% of the solar system that isn't our neighborhood should be exactly LIKE our neighborhood, but we've all met people like that, who object to every place things aren't just like they are back home. I checked into the 50 years that Ceres was accepted without question as a planet. Its large rivals were all discovered within the first ten years, but by 1850, only a total of 10 asteroids are known. By 1868, it was over 100, and by 1891 (when the first photographic discovery was made) there were 332 known, all discovered visually by comparing the sky with the few star charts available. In fact, this search was the chief reason for the development of comprehensive and reliable star charts. But, no asteroid BIGGER than Ceres was ever found. The first TBO was discovered in 1992, 62 years after the discovery of Pluto, and the numbers have been ballooning more dramatically than the number of asteroids did. The discovery of an object not barely but substantially bigger than Pluto, however, was the trigger for a lot of mis-informed furror. I call it mis-informed because we just don't know enough yet. The IAU doesn't need to wait another year; it needs to wait another decade. A body as big as the Earth at 150 AU would be harder to detect than 2003 UB313 was, as would a Neptune sized body at 600 AU. The conventional notion is that the Kuiper Belt ends at 100 or 200 AU, whatever ends means, is ridiculous. We know of asteroids with orbits that go out to 1000 AU. I see no reason why Kuiper Town should end short of the border with Oortville. I will remind everyone that the discovery of Pluto, which was thought to resolve the issue of Neptune's orbital residuals, did not, because the mass ain't there. That's one indication of more mass in the outer system than we think. The Pioneer anomaly is another. Not enough to use in the traditional methods of orbital mechanics, but real enough. Of course, it may be only the residual of many undiscovered bodies, but the Universe could still have a surprise or two up its sleeves. There's LOTS of elbow room out there. Sterling K. Webb
Re: [meteorite-list] umm, odd S-A
Hi, Is that: From SURGE, Middle French sourge-, stem of sourdre to rise, surge, from Latin surgere to go straight up, rise, from sub- up + regere to lead straight? 1 : to rise and fall actively :TOSS a ship surging in heavy seas 2 : to rise and move in waves or billows : SWELL? Hence, SURGATION, the process of surging? Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Martin Horejsi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Rob Wesel [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 12:23 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] umm, odd S-A Hi Rob, On 2/6/06, Rob Wesel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That S-A was quite a thing, a classic example of meteoritic surgation. Hi Rob, Yea, that would be a good way to describe it (although I cannot find the word in the dictionary.com). Here's a pic: http://www.geocities.com/planetwhy/s-a1b.jpg Cheers, Martin __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] ? ed albin ? micromounts ?
Hi, I seem to recall his posting to the List that he was getting out of selling meteorites and micromounts of same. I remember it because I hadn't finished shopping my wish list at the time... If I'm in memory error here, somebody correct me... I could have flipped a bit. Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Bob WALKER [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 3:44 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] ? ed albin ? micromounts ? Hi list Does anyone know if Ed Albin from ye olde meteorite depot is still in business selling rare micromounts and if so how to get in contact with him via email??? __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Orbital debris watching radar
Hi, Darren, I gather from the phrase about having their orbits decay, that by Earth orbit, you mean in orbit about the Earth. Orbits around the Earth only decay because the orbit touches the uppermost atmosphere enough to cause drag which, however minute, reduces orbital velocity. It may seem logical that materials kicked off the Moon would easily and immediately end up in an orbit around the Earth, or at least some of them would. But the truth is that it is nearly impossible to get from the Moon to the Earth, and that lunar meteorites almost certainly do not arrive at the Earth that way, however illogical that sounds. The many simulations of transfer of materials around the solar system show the same result: impact materials from the Moon mostly go into eccentric solar orbits. a small percentage go into co-orbits, that is, they enter solar orbits very similar to the Earth's orbit, sort of wandering along with us, and it is from that population that some get tangled up with the Earth's gravity and get pulled in. Short transit times are 10,000 years. When a lunar shows no cosmic ray exposure, that only means that it was less than 25,000 years. The reason why it's so hard to get from the Moon to the Earth is this: any object that falls to the Earth from a great distance achieves escape velocity by the time it gets very near to the Earth. And escape velocity is just that: you escape. No orbiting for you... There is a point, between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon balance each other. Since the Earth is heavier than the Moon that point is closer to the Moon than the Earth. The point that lies in a straight line between the Moon and the Earth is the first LaGrange Point, BTW. But there are a multitude of points in every direction where equal force vectors from the Moon and the Earth meet: a sheet of zero gravitational potential. If an object is ejected from the Moon's surface toward the Earth without enough velocity to reach the zero sheet, it falls back toward the Moon. If it arrives at the zero sheet with just a smidge of velocity more than zero, it will fall toward the Earth, ramping up to escape velocity or near escape velocity at its closest approach then roar on out into the solar system. If it arrives at the zero sheet with a good deal of velocity more, it will fall on an Earth-influenced path and probably ramp up to a lot more than escape velocity... So, you see, stranger, thar ain't no way to get thar from here... Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Darren Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 1:27 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Orbital debris watching radar On a less argumentative subject, there is an idea I've been wondering about for a while. Thinking back to my wondering about what lunar meteorites do between leaving the surface of the moon and reaching the surface of the Earth, there is the idea that some of them enter Earth orbit and then have their orbits decay until they fall. Given the really fresh lunars found lately, that would seem to imply that there could be more of them in orbit now. So, not really a coherent question but more of a musing-- just how small an object at what distance can the radars that constantly track orbital space program junk around the Earth reliably track? And would there be any way to determine if a piece of orbiting debris was junk or an incoming lunar? __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Orbital debris watching radar REDUX
Hi, Whoops! The ultimate in late-night dopiness, replying to my own post. Some amplifications and clarifications occur to me right away. First, the object that crosses the zero potential sheet with very little residual velocity heads straight into the Earth and burns up in a near vertical descent: no meteorites will be left from that encounter. Simulations show that only a small fraction of one percent of lunar debris make it to the Earth, about half the number of Martian meteorites. Since the number of Lunaites is greater than half the number of Martians, I think that shows we have underestimated the number of impacts that occur in near Earth space. For all practical purposes, the Earth and the Moon are co-targets, proportional to their gravitational and geometric target size, so the Earth is being impacted more than we think also... Which in turn brings me back to my greater fall rate argument... The lunar object that has entered an Earth co-orbit has orbital velocities very similar to the Earth's, the differences being mostly in the geometry of the orbit. When there is a close encounter between the Earth and the lunar object, the small rock is merely deflected into an orbit that grazes the upper atmosphere enough to re-enter it. An example would be a co-orbit with a period of 362 days instead of the Earth's 365.25 days. The Earth and that object would pass by each other every 104.35 years and maybe, just maybe, after 100 passes (10,000 years) of assorted closeness, they would get tangled up and we'd get a new Lunaite. The object's velocity, relative to the Earth's velocity, would be very small, a little faster or a little slower, so it wouldn't be falling from a great distance as in the example of direct transfer from the Moon to the Earth, but merely having its orbital vectors adjusted into an atmospheric encounter... From there on in, it takes the same chances as any meteoroid. In such encounters, the object wouldn't be close to the Earth for more than a few hours on each pass-by, so you'd be radar searching for 104 years in the hope of spotting something during a 100 hour passage, not really practical, if you could do it at all, that is. Of course, the Earth is probably being passed by junk of all kinds all the time, slowly, in co-orbits, without optical detection either, since the only way co-orbiters could be detected would be viewing close to the horizon at dawn and dusk -- the most impossible viewing angle imaginable from the Earth's surface and the lousiest viewing conditions. And, when co-orbiters are far enough away to be in a dark place in the sky, they're too faint to be seen. Perfect. The Earth has a blind spot... Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 3:00 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Orbital debris watching radar Hi, Darren, I gather from the phrase about having their orbits decay, that by Earth orbit, you mean in orbit about the Earth. Orbits around the Earth only decay because the orbit touches the uppermost atmosphere enough to cause drag which, however minute, reduces orbital velocity. It may seem logical that materials kicked off the Moon would easily and immediately end up in an orbit around the Earth, or at least some of them would. But the truth is that it is nearly impossible to get from the Moon to the Earth, and that lunar meteorites almost certainly do not arrive at the Earth that way, however illogical that sounds. The many simulations of transfer of materials around the solar system show the same result: impact materials from the Moon mostly go into eccentric solar orbits. a small percentage go into co-orbits, that is, they enter solar orbits very similar to the Earth's orbit, sort of wandering along with us, and it is from that population that some get tangled up with the Earth's gravity and get pulled in. Short transit times are 10,000 years. When a lunar shows no cosmic ray exposure, that only means that it was less than 25,000 years. The reason why it's so hard to get from the Moon to the Earth is this: any object that falls to the Earth from a great distance achieves escape velocity by the time it gets very near to the Earth. And escape velocity is just that: you escape. No orbiting for you... There is a point, between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon balance each other. Since the Earth is heavier than the Moon that point is closer to the Moon than the Earth. The point that lies in a straight line between the Moon and the Earth is the first LaGrange Point, BTW. But there are a multitude of points in every direction where equal force vectors from the Moon and the Earth meet: a sheet of zero gravitational potential. If an object is ejected from the Moon's
Re: [meteorite-list] Re: Meteorite-list Digest, Vol 26, Issue 30
Steve, List, It's why I love tektites, as a puzzle. Every theory explains some features; no theory explains all the features of those little devils. I regard them as still a wide open mystery, the only scientific mystery still going strong after more than 200 years of hypothesis. (The first tektite theory was published in 1788, long before the first scientific theory of meteorites, which had not even been accepted as real yet.) I keep a table of all the theories of tektites, ancient and modern, and I have 39 listed, including the one that assays that they are the gizzard stones of emus! There are several lunar theories. Nininger (at one time) believed them to be Lunaites, or ejecta from lunar meteoroid impact. Chapman suggested that they were the material that makes up the bright rays that a few young lunar craters display, ejected all the way to the Earth, thinking this would account for their terrestrial distribution pattern (it doesn't). Lunar vulcanism of the ordinary volcanic variety has been suggested several times, the last time by John O'Keefe, who refined it to a suggestion of deep hydrogen volcanoes with hypersonic hot gas plumes, before moving on to another theory. I am not, BTW, denigrating O'Keefe for changing theories in mid-stream. O'Keefe put forward FIVE theories by my count, which gives him more theories than any one else on my list. He spent his not inconsiderable talents on the problem, but all the theory buckets have holes in them and leak like crazy, not just his, but all of them. Today, we have the impact consensus theory, which is actually not a consensus at all, because every impact theorist of note has a tektite impact origin theory of his own which is not compatible with any other impact theorist's tektite theory! But it's called a consensus because the real consensus is that there is no point in wasting any more time on tektites. We've done them to death, performed every test; it's time to move on and just accept the least whacky answer by (unspoken) default. Don't get me started; I wrote that post chewing over the impact theories a long time ago... I even have a pet theory of my own (I call him Bruno and feed him regularly) that manages to explain a lot of tektite puzzles that the other 39 theories don't, but --- guess what? My pet theory has different but glaringly obvious flaws all its own, so it's DOA, just like all the other tektite theories. They're a paradox. They're a problem. They're like the jigsaw that seems to going so well until somebody holds up a piece you'd forgotten about and innocently says, Where's this go? Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Steve Schoner [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 2:41 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Re: Meteorite-list Digest, Vol 26, Issue 30 As Sterling Webb wrote, if the reasoning he posited follows then there is no way that tectites came from the moon. The distribution on the earth, the ablation shapes, stretch forms, and lack of cosmic ray exposure pretty much eliminate the moon as the source. Steve Schoner IMCA #4470 Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 03:00:46 -0600 From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Orbital debris watching radar To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1; reply-type=original Hi, Darren, I gather from the phrase about having their orbits decay, that by Earth orbit, you mean in orbit about the Earth. Orbits around the Earth only decay because the orbit touches the uppermost atmosphere enough to cause drag which, however minute, reduces orbital velocity. It may seem logical that materials kicked off the Moon would easily and immediately end up in an orbit around the Earth, or at least some of them would. But the truth is that it is nearly impossible to get from the Moon to the Earth, and that lunar meteorites almost certainly do not arrive at the Earth that way, however illogical that sounds. The many simulations of transfer of materials around the solar system show the same result: impact materials from the Moon mostly go into eccentric solar orbits. a small percentage go into co-orbits, that is, they enter solar orbits very similar to the Earth's orbit, sort of wandering along with us, and it is from that population that some get tangled up with the Earth's gravity and get pulled in. Short transit times are 10,000 years. When a lunar shows no cosmic ray exposure, that only means that it was less than 25,000 years. The reason why it's so hard to get from the Moon to the Earth is this: any object that falls to the Earth from a great distance achieves escape velocity by the time it gets very near to the Earth. And escape velocity is just that: you escape. No orbiting for you... There is a point
Re: [meteorite-list] Re: Meteorite-list Digest, Vol 26, Issue 30
Norm, That's a wonderful piece of data (and I can't dare say it's hard to swallow...). Darwin had first described the Australites in his account of the voyage of the Beagle in 1844, with a very nice illustration of a classic flanged button. Darwin assumed they were volcanic obsidian but couldn't explain the surface features. Temporarily lost the reference, but shortly thereafter, this geologist wrote that the wrinkles and ridges of tektites were emu gizzard wear. So he was right about the emus but wrong about the origin of the surface features... I've seen lots of dead critters on Illinois backroads, but never a dead emu, so no chance of picking up a nice australite that way... Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Norm Lehrman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Steve Schoner [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 8:57 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Re: Meteorite-list Digest, Vol 26, Issue 30 Sterling, I too got drawn into tektites by the mystery. They often tell their individual stories plainly, but we still can't get the big picture out of them! One comment on your comments though. Tektites (australites) ARE very often emu gizzard stones. In the dry lakes where they are most abundant there are typically only two rock types surviving. Sharply angular little bits of quartz shattered by halite growth and the relatively smooth and conspicuous little australites. The latter are selectively picked by the emus. The aboriginees always check the gizzards of emus taken hunting for australites---and I always checked emus killed on the roadways! That theory is not a theory. Best regards, Norm http://TektiteSource.com --- Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Steve, List, It's why I love tektites, as a puzzle. Every theory explains some features; no theory explains all the features of those little devils. I regard them as still a wide open mystery, the only scientific mystery still going strong after more than 200 years of hypothesis. (The first tektite theory was published in 1788, long before the first scientific theory of meteorites, which had not even been accepted as real yet.) I keep a table of all the theories of tektites, ancient and modern, and I have 39 listed, including the one that assays that they are the gizzard stones of emus! There are several lunar theories. Nininger (at one time) believed them to be Lunaites, or ejecta from lunar meteoroid impact. Chapman suggested that they were the material that makes up the bright rays that a few young lunar craters display, ejected all the way to the Earth, thinking this would account for their terrestrial distribution pattern (it doesn't). Lunar vulcanism of the ordinary volcanic variety has been suggested several times, the last time by John O'Keefe, who refined it to a suggestion of deep hydrogen volcanoes with hypersonic hot gas plumes, before moving on to another theory. I am not, BTW, denigrating O'Keefe for changing theories in mid-stream. O'Keefe put forward FIVE theories by my count, which gives him more theories than any one else on my list. He spent his not inconsiderable talents on the problem, but all the theory buckets have holes in them and leak like crazy, not just his, but all of them. Today, we have the impact consensus theory, which is actually not a consensus at all, because every impact theorist of note has a tektite impact origin theory of his own which is not compatible with any other impact theorist's tektite theory! But it's called a consensus because the real consensus is that there is no point in wasting any more time on tektites. We've done them to death, performed every test; it's time to move on and just accept the least whacky answer by (unspoken) default. Don't get me started; I wrote that post chewing over the impact theories a long time ago... I even have a pet theory of my own (I call him Bruno and feed him regularly) that manages to explain a lot of tektite puzzles that the other 39 theories don't, but --- guess what? My pet theory has different but glaringly obvious flaws all its own, so it's DOA, just like all the other tektite theories. They're a paradox. They're a problem. They're like the jigsaw that seems to going so well until somebody holds up a piece you'd forgotten about and innocently says, Where's this go? Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Steve Schoner [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 2:41 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Re: Meteorite-list Digest, Vol 26, Issue 30 As Sterling Webb wrote, if the reasoning he posited follows then there is no way that tectites came from the moon. The distribution on the earth, the ablation shapes, stretch forms, and lack of cosmic ray exposure
[meteorite-list] Fireball Videos
Hi, Google has a beta of a new Google service: Video Search at http://www.video.google.com/ Searches for bolide and fireball produced nothing of interest (assuming you don't care for clips of things that blow up good!), but a search for meteor produced several clips that actually were of meteors (out of a lot of junk): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3459846800126551001q=meteor Disappointingly, all the videos are in a proprietary Google format; the downloadable player is a cobble of Macromedia Flash (useless); and I haven't found any sure way to get to the original source of the clips... But you can watch them, at least. Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES, Part One
Hi, Got some requests to post my list of Theories of Tektite Origins, so here it is, in small digestible chunks. Anyone who wants to add this to a meteorite website is welcome to, if credit is given. THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES First, it should be noted that tektites have been recognized by human beings as unique objects for millennia. Australian aboriginal peoples collected them for their perceived spiritual qualities. There are European references to moldavites going back to the fourteenth century. The terms in Indomalaysian languages for tektites -- namely, moonballs, stardung, and sunstones -- imply naive but correct theories as to their special origins. (The Sumerians knew what meteorites were; the Sumerian word for meteoric iron, the only kind they knew, means star metal.) Formal theories date from the point at which it becomes recognized that tektites possess unique properties that require an explanation. I have chosen to group them thematically rather than by strict chronology. My personal count of tektite theories (38? 43?) is based on all the individual scientists advancing theories, rather than the groupings of general agreement listed below. Our tour of The Museum of Tektite Origin Theories begins in the Colossally Silly Entrance Hall. 1. Tektites are of artificial origin (that is, human products): Lindaker, 1792, suggested they were slags from furnaces and gas works, or possibly from the burning of earth associated with them. Hillebrand, 1905 and later Berwith, 1917, proposed that they were accidental glass artifacts later discarded. Hillebrand, 1905, later revised this to the notion that they were purposeful glass artifacts by savage man. de Groot, 1880, thought they were tin slags. Never formalized but often mentioned, is the notion that tektites are a product of some kind of natural fires (as in coal seams, etc.) 2. The Really Bad Geology Theories of Tektite Origins: Jensen, 1915: Tektites form as concretations in limestones. Wing Easton, 1921 and Van Ider, 1933: The desiccation of naturally occurring silica gels. There is simply no basis in reality for these suppositions. 3. The Terrestrial Abrasion Theory of Merrill, 1911: Water worn, rolled, abraded and shaped obsidian pebbles, and wind blown sand abraded obsidian fragments, with unique shapes and textures from the gizzard wear of emus! Clever, but only explains australities, as there are no emus in Czechoslovakia, Africa, North America... 4. Lightning Theories: Gregory, 1912, and Chapman, 1929, 1933: The fusion of dust in the atmosphere by lightning, aerial fulgarites. For a 20th Century theory, this is surprisingly like the very ancient theories that meteorites were aerially formed by lightning, i.e., thunderstones. Fulgarite glass and tektite glass are quite dissimilar, of course. Passing through the Colossally Silly Entrance Hall, we next enter the extensive and colorful Volcanic Tektite Exhibition. Continued in Part Two... Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES, Part Two
Hi, Part Two of THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES Passing through the Colossally Silly Entrance Hall, we next enter the extensive and colorful Volcanic Tektite Exhibition. 5. The Terrestrial Volcanic Origin of Tektites: Mayer, in 1788, published the first scientific tektite theory; he called moldavites glassy lavas. Charles Darwin, in 1844 (The Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle), first described australite buttons and identified them as obsidian. He wondered a great deal about their unique shape, but became distracted by some issue or other in biology, so the world lost a great tektite theorist. The volcanic theory became as predominant in the 19th Century as the Impact Theory is today. It was endorsed by Wickman, 1893; van Dijk, 1879; W. D. Campbell, 1906; La Conte, 1902; and Moore, 1916 (who said tektites were identical to Pele's Tears); Simpson , 1902, proposed Australite tektites came from Krakatoa. Dunn, 1908 and 1912, proposed a complicated formation of tektites inside of gas bubbles in fresh lava, a suggestion further developed and complicated by Buddhue in 1940, while Dunn then later (1935) suggested tektites were formed by rain and snow falling on molten lava. The volcanic theories all died when geochemical analysis advances in the 20th Century, as tektites have a composition that is quite different from any terrestrial volcanic rock, and tektites are easily distinguishable from obsidian. It should be pointed out, in defense of Darwin and all the early geologists, that just from the standpoint of holding a tektite and obsidian in your hand and looking at them, they appear to be materially identical. Chemical and physical analysis is required to distinguish them. It would also appear that no one tried breaking a specimen of each, as the fracture morphology of each differs. However, the last Terrestrial Volcanic Theory was proposed in 1976! It is: 6. The Cryptovolcanic Origin of Tektites: McCall, 1976: To understand this at all, we need to dig into the strange tribal relationships of science. British geologists (we invented geology, you know) were firmly wedded (possibly even welded) to the volcanic origin of craters, all craters, of all kinds, on all worlds. An immense amount of energy and thought had been invested in lunar volcanic theory in particular, up through the 1950's. Those who learned their geology at British institutions (Australians, New Zedders, and so forth) were trained in this tradition. The notion of that some craters on the Earth or elsewhere might have been formed by heavy objects falling out of the sky was regarded as a crackpot theory put forward entirely by brash and uninformed colonials of the American variety who were well-known to be fond of whizz-bangs (child-like, you know), and the impact theory was resolutely resisted as errant nonsense up until the moment of the Moon landings, when it all unraveled in a snap. A volcanic explanation was handy; there had always been craters from which volcanic characteristics were absent. They were called by these geologists cryptovolcanic, meaning that their volcanic origins were hidden. This was a theory built on the absence of evidence as a proof of the theory, always a dangerous logical method. Cryptovolcanic craters were postulated to be the result of direct venting of very deep, very hot, high pressure gassy magma to the surface of the planet in a manner analogous to kimberlite pipes. Advances of all kinds, but specifically in the ability to visualize deep strata make cryptovulcanism a bad historical joke. McCall, an Australian geologist and a good one, too, put forward a theory of the cryptovolcanic origin of tektites in 1976. He also disbelieved in the impact origin of terrestrial craters and of extra-terrestrial craters, lunar craters, etc. This, in the post-Apollo era! McCall was neither stupid nor uninformed and he fought a sharp rear-guard action, to his credit. He was honest enough to point out that his own theory was ruined by its inability to explain how you get tektites out of the Earth's atmosphere (to then fall back) without ablating them up completely! Leaving the Volcanic Tektite Exhibition Hall, we enter the spacious Semi-Extra-Terrestrial Pavilion. Continued in Part Three... Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES, Part Three
fiction). Cassidy, 1956, thought tektites derived from a self-melting radioactive planetoid with an acid crust (worrying about The Bomb, are we?). Barnes, 1957, a leading and important tektite scientist, one of the first, briefly entertained the notion that tektites were fragments of a single body of tektite material that has since been destroyed by collisions. Well, it's tempting. Continued in Part Four Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES, Part Four
Hi, Here's Part Four of THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES 12. The Theory that Tektites are Lunaites, or Lunar Meteorites. First advanced by Nininger in 1940, this theory enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960's, being supported at one time or another by Chapman, Adams, Huffaker, O'Keefe, and Kuiper. But analysis of the actual rocks brought back from the Moon killed this theory outright. 13. The Theory that Tektites are Ejecta from Lunar Volcanoes. First proposed by Verbeck in 1897, revived by Linck in 1928, and again by John O'Keefe in 1976. O'Keefe derived them from deep layers in the Moon that we haven't sampled yet, jetted out by cold hydrogen volcanoes at lunar escape velocities or above. 14. The Theory that Tektites Are The Residue of A Former Ring Around the Earth in Eocene Times. John O'Keefe, 1985. The Eocene tektites of North America would be the result of the primary decay of such a ring, followed by subsequent decays, up to the final decay of the ring in the form of the Australo-Asian tektite strewn field. Please note that this is a variation of No. 9 (above) since the ring is composed of tektite material and its disappearance explains why no more tektite material falls to Earth. O'Keefe's Ring hypothesis derives from his earlier proposal (1961) of tektites derived from Cyrillid objects, or captured objects in decaying Earth orbit (his really brilliant analysis of the Chant Trace meteors, 1911). There is nothing impossible (or even unusual) about the notion that the Earth may have once or often had a small satellite in decaying close orbit that was disrupted to form a ring which would certainly subsequently decay away. Rings are part of the normal Solar System paraphernalia, after all. It's a perfectly reasonable proposal, simply a very hard one to prove or find evidence for. There is a Canadian scientist still pushing the ring hypothesis in a somewhat baffling way on the internet. 15. The Theory that Tektites are Residues from Solar Prominences: Himpel, 1938. This notion was advanced to explain the Ice Ages (which it doesn't). Tektites are not solar in composition, hence this is basically just a whacky notion. 16. The Theory that Tektites are Interstellar in Origin: Krause, 1898, and Kohman, 1958. This theory would explain the uniqueness of tektites by pushing them right out of the Solar System altogether, but the lack of CRE (cosmic ray exposure) in tektites argues rather strongly against this idea. Had enough? McCall quotes Dr. George Seddon as remarking to him Before hearing you lecture I thought tektites were quite incredible; now, I know they are impossible! The fact that we currently have a consensus view on the origin of tektites in terrestrial impacts does not really mean the problem is solved. We had a consensus view that they were volcanic for a century or so, too, but, as A. S. Woodward said in 1894, Where they come from, no one knows. Some factors and basic tektite facts to bear in mind while evaluating the validity of various tektite origin theories: Continued in Part Five (tomorrow or the next day) Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Scientist earmarks planets most likely to hold alien life
Hi, Assuming we want to find aliens as much like us as possible? Or assuming we are the model of intelligent life? Or maybe just assuming we have no better criteria to use when looking for intelligent life than our own planetary experience... Seriously looking hard at five planets is a lot more do-able than looking at 17,129 planets, I guess. Break out the Big Ears. Break out the Big Eyes. Howdy, neighbor... Sterling K. Webb http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article346547.ece Scientist earmarks planets most likely to hold alien life By Steve Connor, Science Editor Published: 20 February 2006 Astronomers have identified a star in our Milky Way galaxy that is the most likely candidate for possessing a companion planet that harbours intelligent extra-terrestrial life. It is a sun-like star called beta CVn in the constellation Canes Venatici and it appears to possess all the necessary preconditions that would allow an advanced civilisation to flourish on a nearby planet. The star is 26 light years away - 153 trillion miles - and it heads a shortlist of five stars that astronomer Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution in Washington believes could be the focus of fresh attempts to make contact with other intelligent beings. Dr Turnbull selected her top five from an initial catalogue of 17,129 stars that could be habitable stellar systems where the physical conditions would not be too extreme to limit the evolution and development of intelligent life and its technology. She said she made her choice purely on the characteristics of the stars themselves. Stars are not all the same, and not all of them are like the Sun, Dr Turnbull told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis. The first criterion is that the star had to be at least 3 billion years old, which is about the time it has taken life on Earth to evolve to its present stage. That would be long enough for companion planets to form and for complex life to develop on them. Dr Turnbull said. Stars on the shortlist also had to be no bigger than about 1.5 times the mass of the Sun - bigger stars tend not to live long enough to produce habitable zones, she explained. Each shortlisted star also had to have enough metallic iron in its atmosphere - at least 50 per cent of the iron content of the Sun - otherwise it is unlikey that rocky planets similar to Earth would form around it. The stars also had to be at the right stage of stellar evolution, which eliminated red giant stars or dwarf stars, which would not be suitable for complex life to survive for very long on a nearby planet. We are intentionally biased towards stars that are like the Sun. These are places I'd want to live if God were to put our planet around another star, Dr Turnbull said. Jill Tarter of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Foundation, a privately-funded attempt to detect the non-natural radio signals from advanced civilisations in space, said her organisation will now train its radio telescopes on the five shortlisted stars. Dr Turnbull has also identified the star she believes is most likely to have a companion planet similar to the Earth where simple life could evolve because of the presence of liquid water - thought to be necessary for life. Her top choice is epsilon Indi A, a star that is only one tenth as bright as the Sun about 11.8 light years away in the constellation Indus. It has enough intrinsic luminosity to suggest good prospects for a habitable zone but not so bright as to overwhelm attemps to take images of the planet with telescopes. Dr Turnbull said that the shortlist of habitable zone stars with either advanced civilisations or Earth-like planets is by no means definitive but a reasonably accurate guide for other astronomers to follow. There are inevitable uncertainties in how we understand these stars. If I took 100 stars, it would be very difficult for me to tell which one is the best, she said. However, there are certain conditions that would preclude the development of life and by concentrating Seti's efforts on the best candidates, scientists are more likely to get results even though no one is quite sure what will be done if astronomers ever detect a radio signal from ET. There is no formal policy of what to do if we discover extraterrestrial life, Dr Turnbull said. Top five stars for planets with advanced life * beta CVn, a sun-like star about 26 light years away in the constellation Canes Venatici * HD 10307, another solar analogue about 42 light years away. It has almost the same mass, temperature and metallicity of the Sun. It also has a benign companion star. * HD 211415, about half the metal content of Sun and a bit cooler, this star is just a little farther away than HD 10307. * 18 Sco, a popular target for proposed planet searches. The star
Re: [meteorite-list] I am conducting an experiment...
Hi, Tracy, After a few minutes digging around under my kitchen sink and dragging out decades worth of drain cleaners, I find that plain old Liquid Draino contains Sodium HypoCHLORite, which means that Chlorine atoms are also present in your solution. I must admit to being puzzled as to why you have no access to Lewis Red Devil Lye Drain Opener, which I buy off the supermarket shelf, down one or two shelves from the Draino and other more user- friendly products. Of course, I live in a backward part of the country where, one shelf down from the Red Devil Lye, I can buy Liquid Fire, which is Hydrochloric Acid. I used it in a very stubborn drain once and it really solved the problem... No more drain! Liquid Fire ate it away completely, steel pipes and all! Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: tracy latimer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 3:43 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] I am conducting an experiment... Having no access to Red Devil lye, I read the list of ingredients on Liquid Drano. It seems to be primarily lye-based, with waterglass and a few other elements, so I am trying an experiment on my poor rusty Fredericksburg. Liquid Drano + denatured (anhydrous) alcohol, a shot of each in a glass jar. The expected exothermic reaction did occur (it warmed up), so I took it as a good sign. I will report back if the rust starts to dissolve, without mayhem to the meteorite. Tracy Latimer __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Texas State Research Sheds New Light on Panspermia
Hi, All, survivors he found--a bacteria called Microbispora. Ironically, Microbispora wasn't one of the three species McLean expected to find... McLean determined that it had contaminated the experiment prior to launch... There's a beautiful demonstration of the way Life, the Universe, and Everything (equals 42) works! The shuttle was intelligently designed. The experiment was intelligently designed (to make a pun on that silly notion). Everything was carefully planned. What happened? An Opportunist was the winner, some little bug too dumb to die. Microbispora didn't plan to take a trip to outer space and return to the Earth, but in the end he fared better than the much more capable lifeform that accompanied him. To those who say Evolution can't work (or Life can't arise) through the workings of chance, take a look at Microbispora's vacation trip. So, they're sitting in a Texas parking lot, and one Microbispora turns to the Microbispora next to him, and says, Well, that wasn't so bad, was it? I dunno. We were awfully lucky. Life favors the Opportunist (Exhibit One: Bill Gates) Loren Eisley wrote a fine essay on the primordial fish who, when his pond or puddle dries up, stakes everything on a wild leap in the hope of landing in a better pond or puddle. Many die. Enough land in or near a new pond or puddle and survive that the impulse to make that hopeless suicidal (for a fish) leap is inherited. Those suicidal fish who struggle hardest to find new water, clawing at the mud with their fins to crawl, are most likely to survive. This favors strong footy fins. Before you know it, some of their children just get up and RUN to the nearest pond in a gill-searing dash to find breathable water. Well, you can see where this is going. Eventually, fish are getting out of the water to eat plants and hunt insects and dance by the light of the moon, no doubt to the dismay of their ancestors. Why, you could hardly call some of them fish anymore! All because of an Opportunist who was willing to gamble, senselessly, against the odds. I hope McLean takes these Opportunists back to the lab and gives them a good home. Make a little sign for their petrie dish that says, Bacterial Astronaut Retirement Home. Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 3:25 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Texas State Research Sheds New Light on Panspermia http://talbot.mrp.txstate.edu/currents/fullstory.jsp?sid=689 Texas State research sheds new light on panspermia By Jayme Blaschke Texas State University-San Marcos February 21, 2006 When the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry Feb. 1, 2003, more than 80 on-board science experiments were lost in the fiery descent. Texas State University-San Marcos biologist Robert McLean, however, has salvaged some unexpected science from the wreckage. A strain of slow-growing bacteria survived the crash, a discovery which may have significant implications for the concept of panspermia. The findings will be published in the May 2006 issue of Icarus, the international journal of solar system studies. Panspermia is the idea that life--hitchhiking on rocks ejected from meteorite impacts on one world--could travel through space and seed other worlds with life under favorable conditions. Because the conditions under which panspermia could function are so harsh, however, there's been little direct testing of the hypothesis. That might have been in the back of my mind when we recovered our payload, McLean said. McLean, along with a team of Texas State researchers, had placed an experiment package aboard the Columbia to investigate the interactions of three different bacterial species in microgravity. When the shuttle broke up over Texas, they assumed the experiment lost--until it turned up, relatively intact, in the parking lot of a Nacogdoches convenience store. My first thinking when we found our payload was, 'Let's look for survivors.' And survivors he found--a bacteria called Microbispora. Ironically, Microbispora wasn't one of the three species McLean expected to find. The slow-growing organism is normally found in the soil, and McLean determined that it had contaminated the experiment prior to launch. With the Icarus publication, McLean anticipates request for samples of this rugged strain to come in from researchers around the world. This organism appears to have survived an atmospheric passage, with the heat and the force of impact, he said. That's only about a fifth of the speed that something on a real meteorite would have to survive, but it is at least five or six times faster than what's been tested before. This is important for panspermia, because if something survives space travel, it eventually has to get down to the Earth and survive
Re: [meteorite-list] THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES, Part Two
Hi, Norm, List, My apologies. This statement of mine was a complete and total error. I have no idea where I got this idea, because it is obviously untrue, and on some level I knew that. I offer a fistful of excuses: it was written very late at night; I was coming down with something nasty in the head cold department; a cosmic ray flipped a bit in some brain cell... Tell the waiter I like my crow well done... Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Norm Lehrman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 10:05 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES, Part Two Sterling, Thanks for posting this series! One question though: Item #5: It would also appear that no one tried breaking a specimen of each, as the fracture morphology of each differs. In what way? I've never tried breaking specimens, but I've seen plently of broken ones and have never noticed a difference. As amorphous glass, both obsidian and tektites have a nice conchoidal fracture. However, now that you bring it to my attention, I can imagine a theoretical difference: since most obsidian does have tiny crystallites, and tektites have absolutely none, tektites should have a smoother fracture surface, relatively free of stair-steps. I'll have to go check as soon as I get this written. As an interesting aside, various obsidians were esteemed for varied uses in the stone age. Varieties packed with incipient crystals flaked more crudely than more pure glasses, but because the tiny crystals obstructed the growth of fractures, tools made of such impure material were tougher. Better coarse, heavy duty implements could be made of this. More pure glasses made for perfectly flaked extra sharp arrowheads, but they were essentially one-use items as they broke very easily (there being no crystallites to interfere with fracture growth). Is this the sort of difference in fracture morphology to which you refer? Thanks, Norm http://tektitesource.com --- Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Part Two of THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF TEKTITES Passing through the Colossally Silly Entrance Hall, we next enter the extensive and colorful Volcanic Tektite Exhibition. 5. The Terrestrial Volcanic Origin of Tektites: Mayer, in 1788, published the first scientific tektite theory; he called moldavites glassy lavas. Charles Darwin, in 1844 (The Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle), first described australite buttons and identified them as obsidian. He wondered a great deal about their unique shape, but became distracted by some issue or other in biology, so the world lost a great tektite theorist. The volcanic theory became as predominant in the 19th Century as the Impact Theory is today. It was endorsed by Wickman, 1893; van Dijk, 1879; W. D. Campbell, 1906; La Conte, 1902; and Moore, 1916 (who said tektites were identical to Pele's Tears); Simpson , 1902, proposed Australite tektites came from Krakatoa. Dunn, 1908 and 1912, proposed a complicated formation of tektites inside of gas bubbles in fresh lava, a suggestion further developed and complicated by Buddhue in 1940, while Dunn then later (1935) suggested tektites were formed by rain and snow falling on molten lava. The volcanic theories all died when geochemical analysis advances in the 20th Century, as tektites have a composition that is quite different from any terrestrial volcanic rock, and tektites are easily distinguishable from obsidian. It should be pointed out, in defense of Darwin and all the early geologists, that just from the standpoint of holding a tektite and obsidian in your hand and looking at them, they appear to be materially identical. Chemical and physical analysis is required to distinguish them. It would also appear that no one tried breaking a specimen of each, as the fracture morphology of each differs. However, the last Terrestrial Volcanic Theory was proposed in 1976! It is: 6. The Cryptovolcanic Origin of Tektites: McCall, 1976: To understand this at all, we need to dig into the strange tribal relationships of science. British geologists (we invented geology, you know) were firmly wedded (possibly even welded) to the volcanic origin of craters, all craters, of all kinds, on all worlds. An immense amount of energy and thought had been invested in lunar volcanic theory in particular, up through the 1950's. Those who learned their geology at British institutions (Australians, New Zedders, and so forth) were trained in this tradition. The notion of that some craters on the Earth or elsewhere might have been formed by heavy objects falling out of the sky was regarded as a crackpot theory put forward entirely by brash and uninformed colonials of the American variety who were well-known to be fond of whizz-bangs (child-like, you know), and the impact theory was resolutely
Re: [meteorite-list] Experiment Update #1
Hi, Liquid Drano contains sodium hypochlorite as well as sodium hydroxide, so there are plenty of chlorine ions in this solution, and soaking in it is likely to increase the chlorine ions in the iron rather than leach them out. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Göran Axelsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 6:08 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Experiment Update #1 This is not a rust cleaner treatment, it is a rust stopper treatment. To remove the rust you have to use more traditional methods, like polishing. Acidic solutions with a low Ph makes it easier to dissolv the iron hydroxides in rust but at the same time the iron will be unprotected against oxidation. Basic solutions with a high Ph stops the iron hydroxides to dissolv but protects the iron against oxidation by passivation, it becomes chemically inert. The idea behind the hydroxide solution is to protect the iron while chloride ions are leached out of the meteorite. I would recommend small volumes in the bath, maybe twice the volume of the meteorite but at least covering it, combined with numerous replacement of the solution. In the beginning it should be closer between the changes of the solution as it faster gets contaminated. When the chlorine levels in the meteorite and the solution is in balance it doesn't help to let it lie longer. Archeologists sometimes uses ordinary tapwater in the initial bath but at the end they use deionised or distilled water. And whatever you do, don't use chlorinated water, that could make it rust even faster. /Göran tracy latimer wrote: About 10 days ago I dunked my poor Fredericksburg in what I hoped would be a rust removal bath of half Liquid Drano and half anhydrous alcohol. Since then, I have swirled it about at least once a day, and some of the rust has come off, but not all. The bath is lightly tinged with brown and there is a fine peppering of rust flakes on the bottom of the glass jar. I will give it another week or so, but if there is not a significant change in the quantity of rust in suspension rather than on my meteorite, Freddy will be taken out of the bath and more old fashioned methods of getting rid of rust will be regretfully employed. Watch this space for more fast-breaking news! Tracy Latimer __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG
that the strewn field of bediasites is 5 mi. by 140 mi.? No, that's just the exposure edge of the strata from which the bediasites are eroding. Likewise, the Georgia tektites are only found where that strata is exposed. The strewn field must have covered the entire Eastern United States (and more)! Don't forget the lone Martha's Vineyard tektite (the Vineyardite?), also part of the North American strewn field and chemically identical to the other NA tektites. First, the percentage of easily recovered LDG (surface finds) that has been worked by man is very high. Paleolithic man picked LDG up, used it, transported it, and then discarded it, for about 20,000 years. Subsurface chunks weighing 60 pounds have been found (LDGuong Nongs?). The Sahara has only been a desert lately. That's a geologist's lately, of course, since the end of the latest glaciation, when it started to dry up. It's a brand spanking new desert. Before that, for a long time, it was wet and wooded, rich with game, laced with hundreds of rivers, swamps and deltas. Even in its last days, it was a tallgrass prairie until about 3000 years ago, with many rivers. In the East Sahara, there are Roman grain farms occupied in 400 AD that are now buried that lie 160 miles into the present Sand Sea. This description of the Sahara is very hard to picture if you go to the present location where the LDG roams, with its 1 mm of rain per year, 58 degree C. temperatures and those 500-foot-high dune fields, but the traces of the former paradise are everywhere in the Sahara and have been duly charted by dedicated European geologists who had access to the Sahara while all of Northern Africa was colonial. So, the strewn field has been churned by man for 20,000 years, and then blasted and buried by strata- eating sand storms for 10,000 years, making its footprint less than perfectly clear. This is true of all tektite strewn fields. There were elaborate theories about the sectorial distribution of various types of australites... until other types were found where they shouldn't have been. Ivorites were only found in a narrow strip on the coast... until they were found far out in the Atlantic, making the strewn field 1500 miles wide!. One lone ivorite was recovered in the SOUTH PACIFIC, off Australia, for godssake! And, oh, yeah, some australites in Central America... (Mystery of the antipodal tektites.) The BU press release does not give the location of the Kebira Crater, but the strewn field is centered on 25.5 degrees North and 25.5 degrees East. Guess it's time to search the Internet. Going to this Terraserver view of the Kebira Crater: http://www.terraserver.com/imagery/image_gx.asp?cpx=25.53024396cpy=24.67255158res=375provider_id=350t=pandat=OL=Off You will see the crater at the center of the left edge of the image, and moving your cursor toward the center of the upper edge of the image will locate the center of the strewn field, about 100 km NNE of the crater. (Cursor lat-long is shown in the dialog box.) Those 500-foot-high parallel dunes are clearly visible even in the satellite view! Also visible if you zoom in on the crater are the skeletal rivers, braided deltas, and wetlands of the Good Old Days. At impact time (28.5 mya), this area may well have been very shallowly submerged (like the Fayum). The crater. is centered on 24.98 degrees North and 24.68 degrees East. Anyway, this puts the strewn field outside the crater, a Pro-Tektite Point.. So, is LDG a tektite? Me, I say, too wet. Would I buy Semi-Tektite? A Near-Tektite? An Odd Tektite? No, I think it is only because the source rock was a pure sandstone composed almost entirely of silica that we ended up with a nice transparent and contaminant- free impact glass that reminds us so much of a yellow moldavite (found at similar distances from their crater), that we are misled into regarding LDG as a potential tektite. To me, the interesting point is that the LDG should be a tektite. IF the naive form of the impact theory is true, all the conditions have been met. The crater's big enough (ten times bigger than the ivorites' crater). They're found at a suitable distance outside the crater, as far away as moldavites. All the factors required to produce an unquestioned tektite are in place. They have a superb match to the source rock, and that source rock is exactly what impact theorists have always said it should be, sedimentary. The LDG's SHOULD BE perfect casebook tektites. So, why are they so damn wet? Why are there NO indications of any aerodynamic modeling features or traces thereof? (The similar moldavites have fantastic aerodynamic features.) And why would a classic impact-theory impact fail to produce these two hallmarks? (Something seriously wrong with the theory, that's my guess...) This is actually a more general point: there are lots and lots of impact craters but very few tektite producing ones; why? Sterling K. Webb
Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG
all. I wonder what they thought when the sky dropped millions of pieces of hot glass on them, to fall with a sizzle into the still water below? First, everything floods and we have to move up into these stinking FEMA treehouses, and now there's hot glass falling from the sky... The world is going to hell. Doug, did I answer your question? Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 4:05 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG Sterling W. writes: Crustal rocks have 5 or 10 times more fluorine than boron. Tektites should have a ratio of 1.0, indicating that they were heated to temperatures high enough to drive off most of the fluorine and leave the two halogens at identical levels (however low the absolute amount), and indeed tektites have values that float around 1.0 (like 0.8 to 1.2). The tested LDG F/B ratio is 1.0. Norm, Sterling, Mark, Tracy, list, I'm still on the fence about Libyan Desert Glass and how it fits into the puzzle and I wanted to thank Norm for the motivation to reconsider some of it based on the additional support that that LDG may have actually been tossed a significant (lateral?) distance to its resting point. Norm, my thoughts on the difference in the mechanism of formation here are basically along the lines pursued by Wasson, that Muong Nongs (and probably LDG's) result from a different conceptual and physical event: that while they may be clearly or partially impacted and have received a portion of their formation from that, that importantaly also: a major source of the energy that led to their formation was being broiled by an overhead explosion perhaps of a manyfold-Tunguska type, or by the same clould of incredible enery flux that formed some of the true-to-form tektites. This is why I am on the fence - because I feel more comfortable with that scenario to fall back upon. Just want to hold on to a concept, of what tektite means to me as Norm originally asked. While Norm argued to liberalize the definition to include LDG's, I'm playing the conservative interpretation here like Sterling is also joining to do. I don't disagree, just ask for one positive indication in my preferred set of rules. Norm might just be right if we play by his rules and accept that LDG's were chucked a good distance and thus call them tektites based on that criterion. At minimumn LDGs are more important now as we glean more information from them and maybe an additional piece of the endless puzzle. I am really not quite sure why Sterling mentions the F and B assays would tend to identical levels in tektites, and I while it may be my turn to split hairs, I think this is an interesting research point, but presented inside out. Yes, Fluorine is generally more volatile and probably preferentially driven off, though we should verify this is true for the source matrix solubility before being 100% convinced. The major problem I have here is that there is nothing magic about having them with the same concentration level as you imply, I think this is just a coincidence on what has been looked at so far, possibly related to the temperatures and residence times (determined by physical constraints) in the liquid state of formation too, yes, of course, but that is as far as I would go. That is why I think it is too great a leap of faith to discuss why they would be perfect tektites based on these measurements. Putting this [F]:[B] further under the microscope, it is also of academic interest to compare this to the source rock - but I would never flip that around to discuss why [F] and [B] should be identical or at a particular ratio without knowing the initial values in the source rock, since I cannot fathom any mechanism that would insist that tektites should have these levels identical, and the range you quote and attribute some special meaning to, anyway for tektites floating goes below 1.0 anyway, and as a matter of fact the tektites could easily have much lower values for this ratio than you quote, has Dr. Koerbel and colleagues ever fired up their special Boron sensitive electrode to check these numbers for moldavites lately? Basically, Sterling is making a big assumption by saying that the source rocks of the sandstone are in the range of 5 - 10 for a [F]:[B] ratio, and I think frankly that is a poke in the dark or leap of faith at minimum. I would much rather see someone actually go measure the [F] and [B] numbers for relatively unaltered sandstone near the excitingly discussed crater just to check that the ratios didn't happen to start out at values much closer to equal ... there is significant variation on the earth. The bottom line in my view is that the interpretation of the Fluorine and Boron
Re: [meteorite-list] OT: 1859 aurora in HI
Hi, From the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich_Islands The Sandwich Islands was the name given to Hawaii by Captain James Cook on his discovery of the islands on January 18, 1778. The name was made in honour of one of his sponsors, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who was at the time the First Lord of the Admiralty and Cook's superior officer. During the late 19th century, the name fell into disuse. The Sandwich Islands should not be confused with the South Sandwich Islands, an uninhabited British dependency in the southern Atlantic Ocean. Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: ks1u [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: tracy latimer [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 7:10 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] OT: 1859 aurora in HI Tracy: Unless there are other islands of the same name, the Sandwich Islands with which I am familiar are just north of Antarctica in the South Atlantic. It would not be unusual for them to get an Aurora but it would be an Aurora Australis and not Borealis. I don't pay great attention to the Southern Lights but I'm sure there are some sources on the internet which monitor them. It would be unusual for Hawaii to get the Aurora although I have never heard of it prior to your mention of it. I'll do some checking myself, as you have peaked my interest. I monitor solar activity daily as an amateur radio operator, because solar flux and sun spots determine the MUF(maximum usable frequency) for worldwide radio communications, and part of those charts include aurora. George __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG
Gee, Doug, For once, I am not creating a crackers theory of my own. I am merely explaining how a certain geochemical test procedure works. Not being a geo- or a cosmo- chemist, I am taking the word of Matthies, D. and Kroeberl, C., Fluorine and Boron Geochemistry of Tektites, Impact Glasses, and Target Rocks, Meteoritics, 26 (1991), 41-45, both of whom AM geochemists. Also, see K. H. Wedepohl, Handbook of Geochemistry (1978). Blah, blah. Think about it. You gotta rock. Mixture of complicated crystals. Many elements. Huge heating event. Rock melts. Rock vaporizes. Molecules dissociate. Now it's a plasma, composed entirely of elements, too hot to form compounds. The volatile elements in this plasma escape from the plasma faster than the less volatile, which in turn escape faster than the refractory (who are stubborn and hang around). The plasma continues to heat. Volatiles go faster and faster. At a high enough temperature, the mean free path of atoms and their rate of escape is pretty much totally determined by the thermal energy of the plasma and the mass of the atom and the chemical characteristics of the substance matter not at all. It's physics now, not chemistry. Element 5 (mass 11) and element 9 (mass 19) are both moving like there was a 38,000 degree plasma on their tail (and there is). They now escape at a similar rate. Get the literature. Look at the pretty graphs that show how it works. There's some chemical reason why this happens about the time they're at the same concentration, but I forget it. It's chemistry. Me, when I look at things like equilibrium condensation diagrams or the reverse of same, my eyes start to glaze over... So I just take their word for it. But as a physical phenomenon, it fits my intuition. Look at the other light atoms. Not many of them hanging around either. Makes silly hand gestures, points to self. I no chemist. Physicist. Like big things (universe, stars, planets, rocks the size of countries). Like little things (quarks, leptons, cute little bosons, petite atoms). Don't like things inbetween. That's why God made chemists and botanists. Let them sort it out. They like that sort of thing for some reason... In 1962, when the number of elementary particles officially went over 200, Enrico Fermi, getting old and cranky, yelled, Look at this f***g zoo! If I wanted this mess, I'd have become a botanist! (He was right; how can you have more elementary particles making up elements than there are elements? Maybe it means that making elements is hard.) Crusty old physicists. Show me String Theory when you can put the whole thing on ONE PAGE. Otherwise, go back and work on it some more. Deep breath. The F/B ratios for ALL terrestrial rocks comes from Kroeberl and Company (all of this does). That's for the bulk compositional analyses of crustal rocks everywhere that geologists have made 100,000's of for the last century or so. Boring... Boron's just not as common as fluorine. The ratios run 10:1, 20:1, 30:1. Earth rock just isn't (in bulk) boronic. That crusty stuff in Death Valley doesn't count... If boron was common, would they have send Ronald Reagan and those 20 mules into Death Valley? (Old TV referrence.) If you think this is all hooey, complain to Kroeberl and Co. Also Wedepohl, who publishes thick books full of endless tables of bulk elemental compsitions. Lemme know what happens. Seriously, I am miffed. I don't think this stuff is whacky enough to be one of my whacky notions, and I'm insulted that anyone should think so... Obviously, I'm not being whacky enough. I'm quiting. It's late enough that I could go out and wave at that comet myself. Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2006 2:34 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG Sterling W. writes: I don't know the values for the Nubia Sandstone, but the range of sandstones is fluorine 180 to 450 ppm and boron about 10 to 85 ppm. The figures for LDG is fluorine 7 ppm and boron 7 ppm, so you see how the ratios shift as the content drops. As the temperature rises (microsecond by microsecond), the fluorine content drops much faster than the boron content. At some very high temperature (variable for each source rock), both fluorine and boron levels become the same, but at a higher level than in the final product. After that point, both are driven out of the melt plasma at the same rate, their petty chemical differences totally overwhelmed by the energy available. So, fluorine goes faster until that point is reached, after then, they drop together. Hola Sterling, Petty chemical differenceshm.overwhelmed at moment x when they behave identically (this is the cartoon and then a miracle happens and we get the desired solution
Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG
the impact site, goes right out the window. The high speed re-entry of an immense swarm of glassy rubble (and when I say immense, I mean many billions of pieces) could produce a rain of glass vapor cooling to molten microspheres in the last moment before landing, and then another swarm, and another. Would that necessarily happen adjacent to the crater? No. There are ocean finds of layered tektites off the Caribbean coast of South America. That's a long way from the Chessy Crater. Of course, they could also be found closer to the crater, like in Georgia (they are), but they could be anywhere in the strewn field. That's the point. This just takes an already headache level, very complicated mystery and boosts it way up the Migraine Scale to what-is-going-on-here? It produces the paradoxical result that, while ordinary tektites may be superheated droplets of melt that didn't quite vaporize, the Muong Nongs may be the product of droplet condensation from a vapor, a conclusion that is pretty much completely backwards from the way most people conceptualize the formation of tektites. There's that headache factor again... Why do the layers tend to alternate colors? Shut up; I have a headache... As for Darryl's analysis of the micro-voids in Muong Nongs, I don't know if he ever published or even communicated it. We were talking about it the week he died. Somebody want to section a Muong Nong and look? By the way, there are layered tektites from three of the four major strewn fields, all but the Ivory Coast. (But, then, ivorites are very rare, with few examples compared to other falls.) So, it's probably a universal outcome of the Tektite Event, whatever that is. While I always worried about the asteroid hit, or the stray comet hit, the usual cosmic catastrophe, a straightforward impact event, I was so fascinated by tektites that I never thought to worry that much about the event. But after envisioning clouds of rock vapor and repeated fiery rains of molten droplets over hundreds of miles, I wonder if we ought to worry more than we do. Or at least, figure out what they are... Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Norm Lehrman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Larry Lebofsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2006 9:13 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG All, Thanks for the fabulous discussion. I had to take time out from the discourse to wash, size-sort, cull, and count 10,000 tektites for an order I'm supposed to ship tomorrow, and all of this gave me a lot to mull over. And it did a lot to reinvigorate the wonderment of the puzzle that first drew me to tektites. For any of you on the list that may be new to the subject, this discussion serves as an appetizer for the much larger array of puzzles posed by tektites. On the more immediate topics; Doug, I very much like your thought of an aerial thermal event like a mega-Tunguska for Muong Nongs and maybe Edieowie also. And Sterling, I to find the F/B story intuitively comfortable and rational. Larry, your comment regarding something like a plasma condensate for true tektites as opposed to simple splash glass impactites feels good. Pieces are beginning to fall into place in new combinations for me. More after I get the counting finished--- Norm http://tektitesource.com --- Larry Lebofsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sterling: Sounds good to me (though I study big rocks that you can see with a telescope). It sounds like it is time for me to start reading up on tektites too! As a novice, would you basically say that tektites come from volatilized material that has recondensed while an impactite derives from melted material that never got hot enough to vaporize. Obviously, you would have ranges of materials (hotter vapor or hotter and more devolatilized liquid). Larry PS Did you see the comet? Never been clear enough and no access to a telescope where I am. -- Dr. Larry A. Lebofsky Senior Research Scientist Co-editor, Meteorite __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Red Rain From Comets?
Hi, This particular red rain story has been around for 5 years, since the rain fell in 2001. The news here is that it's finally being tested by someone other than the initial Indian investigators, whose paper on the red rain particles was accepted by Astrophysics and Space Science, a well-known journal (but pro-panspermia) this January. Louis and Kumar's paper can be found at: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0601/0601022.pdf Normally, I would blow this sort of thing off; we all know the red rains are African (or Arabian) dust. It fell on the Africa facing coast of India, blah, blah... It's been widely bandied about on nutty websites nobody wants to be seen looking at, and so forth. But when I heard this evening, the BBC do a story about Sheffield studying it, I dug up this paper and read it. Now I'm sceptical about my scepticism. Take a look at the microphotographs and the TEM and SEM photos. This is not dust, obviously. To call them biological in appearance is a study in understatement and modesty. Not being an expert in anything biological nor the appearance of cells in TEM and SEM, I invite the List's sceptics, whom I know exist from the last Panspermia go-round, to look this over and post an opinion. They look like biological cells, but not like the usual cells in some specific ways. They have thick walls, membranes, surface features, detail, and inner organizations, and are 4 to 8 micrometers in diameter. They have no DNA or RNA, apparently. Their bulk composition is mostly CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen), 98%. They did fall from the sky, at least 50 tons of them. They do not seem to do anything, do not culture, grow, or change. However, sealed jars of them in their original rainwater have remained unchanged, undecayed or altered, after four years. In they were inorganic, that would be understandable, but a CHON mixture would rot in rainwater, or be eaten by real bacteria. The solution must have some bacteria as they were primitively collected; what happened to them? Comments? Ideas? Debunkment? Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2006 10:50 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Red Rain From Comets? http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,1723936,00.html Red rain could prove that aliens have landed Amelia Gentleman and Robin McKie The Observer (United Kingdom) March 5, 2006 There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers. Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points. Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001. Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'. But a few researchers believe Louis may be on to something and are following up his work. Milton Wainwright, a microbiologist at Sheffield, is now testing samples of Kerala's red rain. 'It is too early to say what's in the phial,' he said. 'But it is certainly not dust. Nor is there any DNA there, but then alien bacteria would not necessarily contain DNA.' Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he says. In addition, one analysis showed the particles were 50 per cent carbon, 45 per cent oxygen with traces of sodium and iron: consistent with biological material. Louis also discovered that, hours before the first red rain fell, there was a loud sonic boom that shook houses in Kerala. Only an incoming meteorite could have triggered such a blast, he claims. This had broken from a passing comet and shot towards the coast, shedding microbes as it travelled. These then mixed
Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG
Hi, Mike, The hypervelocity impact has always been in the running for The Tektite Source, off and on. The worse case would be a comet with an orbital eccentricity of .99 in a retrograde orbit. In other words, a first-timer falling out of the Oort Cloud from 10,000 AU or 20,000 AU out that's traveling like the proverbial bat out of hell by the time it gets to the inner Solar System that would then smack into the Earth when we're headed right for it. All the bad luck in the world. A comet's still bound to the Sun's gravity, so we can figure its velocity at the Earth's orbital distance, sum up all the bad-luck velocities, and get a maximum possible impact velocity of about 73.4 km/sec. That for any object gravitationally bound to the Sun (not an alien spacecraft under power), but comets are the only likely ones. The average impact velocity we'd get from a NEA would be 15-20 km/sec, so the retrograde comet hit would be about four times faster. Back to the bad luck department: the energy depends on the square of the velocity, so the bad-luck comet hit would deliver sixteen times the energy per pound than the usual mass-extincting disaster. Ouch x 16. So, it's really nice that the odds of a collision with a long-period comet are so low... (To figure those odds, calculate the area of a sphere with a radius equal to the Earth's orbital distance, divide by the cross-sectional area of the Earth's disk, and you have the odds of any one long-period comet, which could come from any direction, hitting the Earth.) When all is said and done, the chances are from one hit per 2,000,000,000 years to one hit per 500,000,000 years, depending on how frequent long-period comets are (argument in progress). Really nice, because such a comet could just as easily be up to 100 miles across or more, or like the recent Hale-Bopp. (Was it only 40 or 60 miles across?) Getting hit by an object this size, at any speed, makes the Big Kill All The Dinosaurs Asteroid (10 miles across) look like a kid's fire- cracker, a puny firecracker at that. Getting hit by a 100 mile object is just plain unthinkable. Are there other big objects? Chiron, the Centaur (which is both Comet 95P and Minor Planet 2060) between Saturn and Uranus and is about 160 miles across, was deflected there by Jupiter (most likely). All the Centaur objects (all pretty big, over 100 of them!) are orbitally unstable on a 100,000 year time scale and have about a 20% chance of escaping inward (and 80% outward). Root for them to head outward, please. But comets in general have more eccentric orbits than asteroids, which means higher impact velocities in general, so their impacts are likely to be more energetic (by the square, a mere 44% increase resulting in double the punch). But even mildly big objects, 500 meters or 1000 meters, are not bothered by our atmosphere one bit, even at a 30 degree angle. Air provides great protection against small and medium bodies but once you get up to the large size impactor, it doesn't even slow it down. A 500 meter body that would achieve 15 km/sec might only lose less than 1 km/sec of that velocity, not a big help. A 1000 meter (and up) body would lose even less speed. A 10,000 meter body wouldn't slow down at all. There are other reasons for suspecting a comet- tektite connection, but I'm saving it for another post to the List. Stay tuned. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Mike Fowler [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: Mike Fowler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 11:11 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG This is actually a more general point: there are lots and lots of impact craters but very few tektite producing ones; why? Sterling K. Webb Why not very high velocity comet impacts, at a near vertical angle. Maximum cometary velocities would be about 10 times more than average asteroidal impacts. Near vertical would reduce the atmospheric column that the explosion has to punch thru to the minimum. Looked at from this point of view, perhaps only 1 in 100 crater producing impacts would qualify, which might explain why there are many large craters, but few tektite strewn fields. Mike Fowler Chicago __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Red Rain From Comets?
Hi, If these were algae or their spores, they would grow, bloom, or whatever it is algae do. They would also give you a big positive in the kind of DNA test that was performed on the funny cells. The fellow at Sheffield interviewed by the BBC talked about this particular test being done on a jar of algae and how positive it was. He's going to duplicate Louis' test, and he said he didn't really doubt that the outcome would be the same, because the test was so straightforward. As far as Louis' hypothesis about the cells being delivered by a meteor airburst, I ignore it completely. Nothing is more fruitless than endlessly arguing about an unobserved delivery system hypothesis. One should not waste a second on how these guys got here until and if we have determined what these things are. The notion that one airburst could rain down weird particles in the same location for days or weeks is utterly silly, as if the atmosphere had no horizontal transport, like, maybe, wind? I don't think delivery is a problem. Stuff falls into the ocean, small particles are transpired upwards (like algal spores), and rain out over Kerala for days, weeks, months. No big deal. The only question that matters is WHAT, not how. Naively, since it's neither my job nor my field of study, I can't imagine that, after more than a century of microbiology and the (apparently) incredible sophistication of the field, somebody can't tell us whether this thing that looks like a cell IS a cell or not. It would seem like the most simple and obvious of questions. I hadn't found that bit about how Louis had tried culturing them in weird substances (mentioned in your subsequent post). Using Cedarwood oil may seem a strange choice, but it is used as a preservative because it kills all microbial life dead, dead, dead. The fact that it was at 300 C. suggests that whatever these things are, they don't contain (much) water, else they'd pop. Excuse me, lyse. Me, I would have tried: a) ammonia, water, with methane and a bit of hydrogen, weak light, and coolish (Titan) b) low pressure CO2, argon, a bit of water vapor, more light, less cool (Mars) c) high pressure CO2 and sulfurous stuff, plenty hot (Venus) Well, all the Solar System environments. You get the idea. Since CO2 seems to be so ubiquitous, I'd try warm CO2, straight up, barkeep. Then, there's the other possible regimes. Maybe they have thick walls and are quiescent because of all this nasty oxygen everywhere. Would they like a taste of chlorine? A dash of fluorine, perhaps? A pick-me-up of bromine? Iodine? I mean, we swim in this deadly poisonous oxygen constantly and we actually seem to enjoy it! That's very strange. But fluorine, a better and more effective oxidative agent than the weaker oxygen seems to cause us to fall down and die... Likewise, chlorine and the rest. Switch'em around. See what happens... Life could just as well use a reduction cycle to generate chemical energy for themselves, instead of oxidation. Try them out; see what happens. If it seems nobody can say what these things are by looking at them, poking, prodding, like a three-year-old, let's see if we can get them to DO something. One thing we CAN say about life, it ought to DO something. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: mark ford [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 7:29 AM Subject: RE: [meteorite-list] Red Rain From Comets? HI Stirling and list, This is indeed an interesting one. I'm not an expert, but the large algal blooms that periodically appear in the pacific/atlantic and Indian oceans would be a likely suspect to me... It is well known that algae (and other simple life forms) reproduce by water evaporation (through TINY spores which are carried to high altitude by the normal terrestrial water cycle, i.e evaporation/rain). Try putting a bucket outside and within weeks it will have algae growing in it - from the rain. Now I am not sure if these 'algal spores' would show up as 'biological' in the particular DNA test that Louis and Kumar performed but do I know that alagal spores are very primeval in form, (since they practically the oldest life form), and they have a vast range of shapes and sizes some remarkably similar to the one's in Louis and kumar's paper. Example of spores at http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/ppfspor.html Now we are talking about serious quantity of material here, but take a look at some photos of an algal blooms they often cover many hundreds of miles and appear on satellite photos! (Also common in India as it happens) http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceancolor/scifocus/IOC/IOC_1.shtml Also One alledged sonic boom is WAY not enough evidence to link the red rain with a 'comet impact', no physical evidence for a meteor event was put forward, 'Sonic booms
Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG -- ONE MORE TIME!
and their tektites do not match well for all elements in ways hard to explain. Paradoxically, the target rocks DO produce impact glasses at the same time and place; there are many varieties of impact glasses at Ries, in addition to the famous tektites, same for other sites. The chemistry of these impactites do not match the tektites from the same location. Hmm. b) Tektites are all the same because they are formed entirely from one specific type of impactor (of which, for some reason, we have no other samples, and not at all from the local target rocks. End of story. Anyone want to shave this puppy, or is that greased pig, with Occam's Razor? Koeberl? Nah, let's just read his paper to get it in writing: The low F and B contents in LDG and Aouelloul impact glasses are most probably due to low contents in the precursor materials. Koeberl's most probably due sounds suspiciously like he didn't test the source rock, or look it up either. I translate most probably due as I guess. Doesn't sound like hard data to me. He doesn't say, Since Rock X has F/B vaues of xxx/yyy... or even The report of Messrs, A, B, and X give xxx ppm for... He doing the bread-and-butter thing, writing a paper; if you have data, you use it. But beyond that, arguing away some parts of the results as due to characteristics of the source rock ASSUMES that the source rocks are the source of tektites, but that's one of things we're trying to find out, isn't it? Well, isn't it? Oh, and BTW, lighten up, Doug. People will still be arguing about tektites long after we're both dust, you know. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 2:47 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Largest Crater in the Sahara Desert and LDG Sterling W. writes: Doug, the actual language Kroeberl uses is that the F/B ratio of tektites should tend toward 1.0. This is Professional Science Speak for too complex to model exactly, but most of the cows ought to stampede in this direction... Hola Sterling, I asked you where you got the moldavite value for boron. You are now a primary source on the Internet saying that moldavites have this content and some tektite man at some place like lpi may believe you... It is very tedious to measure boron apparenty by spectrophotometric methods - it would be a fair question to ask you how you got it...Slap me, call me insulting, do I really deserve it because it sure sounded to me you might have invented the typical value of Boron=30 ppm in moldavites and pass it off as a typical number for moldavites because you got caught up in a roll fitting numbers to produce a 1.0 ratio you were trumpeting - when you had no such data. If I am wrong please forgive me enough to be on speaking terms, and if I am right, please come clean. Let me say I am much more comfortable with this last post you made than the prior last off-the-wall statements about tektite formation at 34,000 degree (you really did say this, I read all of your posting) plasma-formed tektites miraculously being heated in microseconds to the point where first fluorine is driven off to a theoretical identical level as boron, and then they diffuse out at identical rates ignoring petty chemical differences. We could start with considering that at the temperature you quoted being reached, neither water, nor silicon dioxide the base material of tektite glass would survive, so I think you are confusing tektites with theoretical particle physics over a few pitchers in the Athenaeum. I mean this in the nice way, and need to state it as it is the heart of my disagreement on the sloopy use of the data. I am really entertained by your posts generally - you are probably my favorite poster! But you have have mixed speculation with data here and taken liberties to mix them and present them labeled as fact. While Dr. Koeberl (please check the proper your spelling of your sources' surname) may have used the word tend as you state above, did it occur he just meant that the average of a few measurements was in a ballpark of 1? Let's not turn this incredibly simple issue into a greased pig with talk of cows stampeding and so forth. I don't need to sort it out with Dr. Koeberl as you suggested, I think his paper was self explanatory, well done though not one of his better ones, though it would have benefitted by someone proofreading better the English as to not give rise to such ambiguities in interpretation. Also, as I asked you to kindly clarify, and you did, the sample size as I asked you to clarify was tiny - I'm not gonna let you off the hook on that yet. And you're right; he didn't analyze that many samples. I wish he had more data. Well, let's do better here: the paper has five tektite samples for which both fluorine
Re: [meteorite-list] Strange Newspaper Headline About Meteorites
Hi, Nothing seems to have come from the Greenland fireball. The explanation I heard was that the speed estimates were just an error. However, there are meteors that ARE interstellar, tiny 100 micron ones, anyway. AMOR radars have always detected a small percentage of meteors with velocities above 75 km/sec. Decades ago, these were often ignored as glitches in the equipment but the detections persist as the electronics and the sensitivity of the equipment have improved immensely, in fact, have increased in number, so it's generally accepted that they're real. A big percentage of them come from the direction of beta Pictoris and its huge dust disk, a good source of interstellar particles, but hardly a preferred location for glitches... Once upon a when I extrapolated like crazy and cooked up an estimate of how many tons of interstellar material must be streaming through the solar system to account for the numbers intercepted by Earth and detected on Amor radars, and while I can't remember the figure, it was not inconsiderable. The Galaxy leaks... Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Larry Lebofsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 2:22 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Strange Newspaper Headline About Meteorites Paul: Did a Google search and found the following on CCNet Digest. http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc082198.html Event occurred in Dec. 1997! Larry Co-editor Meteorite magazine PLEASE NOTE: Information circulated on the cambridge-conference network is for scholarly use only. The attached text may not be reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. * CCNet DIGEST, 21 August 1998 (1) INTERSTELLAR METEOROIDS Duncan Steel [EMAIL PROTECTED] (2) METEORITE DUST TO BE TESTED The Electronic Telegraph (3) GREENLAND IMPACTOR MAY HAVE COME FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACE MSNBC Space News http://www.msnbc.com/news/189444.asp (4) DOUBTS ABOUT INTERSTELLAR ORIGIN OF GREENLAND METEORITE Mike DiMuzio [EMAIL PROTECTED] (5) TASK COMPLETED IN GREENLAND The Tycho Brahe Expedition http://www.astro.ku.dk/tycho/tbe98/english/status/ === (1) INTERSTELLAR METEOROIDS From Duncan Steel [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dear Benny, Item from The Daily Telegraph (21 August 1998) appended. The existence of meteoroids and/or comets arriving from interstellar space is a subject which has been contentious for decades; see: A.D. Taylor, W.J. Baggaley D.I. Steel, Discovery of interstellar dust entering the Earth's atmosphere, Nature, 380, 323-325 (1996). Duncan Steel --- (2) METEORITE DUST TO BE TESTED From the Electronic Telegraph International News Friday 21 August 1998 Issue 1183 Meteorite dust to be tested DUSTY remains of a meteorite that crashed into Greenland are to be tested to see if it came from outside our solar system. The extreme speed of the object, recorded on video film, suggests it may have come from interstellar space, which would mark a first if confirmed. A giant fireball was seen on 9 December over a large part of southern Greenland. Some reports said that night was turned into day and others likened it to a giant millipede of fire with yellow, glowing legs. The meteorite was calculated to weigh at least a ton. An expedition to the south-western part of the Greenland ice cap found no large meteorite fragments, only about 200 samples of dust. END Copyright 1998, The Daily Telegraph === (3) GREENLAND IMPACTOR MAY HAVE COME FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACE From MSNBC Space News http://www.msnbc.com/news/189444.asp Sleuths bring meteorite dust from Greenland: Space rock may have come from beyond solar system REUTERS COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Aug. 20 - A meteorite which crashed into Greenland last December may have come from outside our solar system, a Danish astronomer said Thursday. He said that would be a world first in the meteorite field. A FOUR-WEEK EXPEDITION to the southwestern part of the Greenland ice cap failed to find fragments of the meteorite but returned home Wednesday with about 200 samples of dust. Astronomer Lars Lindberg Christensen of Denmark's Tycho Brahe Planetarium, a member of the seven-man expedition, said analysis of the dust samples could yield clues to the origin of the meteorite. It may have come with enough speed that it actually originated outside our solar system. That would make it a world first, he told Reuters by telephone. The center has collected more than 100 eyewitness reports, three seconds of videotape and data from a U.S. defense satellite of the meteorite's plunge through the Earth's atmosphere. Calculations based on the video frames of the meteorite's descent, which lit up
[meteorite-list] RED RAIN IN INDIA
Hi, Many interesting items about the red rain. Mark Ford mentioned that the article in the New Scientist magazine suggested bat blood, presumably from large flights of bats being struck by planes or otherwise aerially injured. So, I 've been researching bat's blood. (These things take you odd places, don't they?) The red blood cells of mammals are without DNA, since they are not intended to reproduce. Red blood cells are generated in the bones, released to the blood stream, live a short life, and die. Hence, no DNA nor cell nucleus. The appearance of the alien cells in the SEM microphotographs greatly resemble mammalian red blood cells. Bat blood red cells are somewhat unique among mammalian red cells. Human red cells have a life span measured in weeks, not months or years. Bat red cells are very long-lived, long enough, in fact, that we are not sure how long they live. The blood of bats has the highest known concentration of red cells of any mammal; their blood is wall-to-wall red cells. Moreover, the chemical composition of the bat red cell is very high in lipids, far more fatty than any other mammal's. This facts explain many of the characteristics of the alien cells. The high lipid content and long lived cells explain how they can remain undecayed and stably preserved for a long period since they were collected. Several papers on bat blood remarked on how self-preservative it was. The high density of red blood cells in bat blood explains how a red rain would seem to consist of nothing but these cells, with little or no other organic debris being present. I would expect that animal and insect scavengers would have eliminated any little bat scraps before the red rain was collected. As far as their appearance, the following paper: http://www.genomesize.com/rgregory/reprints/MammalRBC.pdf has microphotos of bat eryhtrocytes (and cat and human). The resemblance to the microphotographs of the alien cells is striking. The thick walls, for example, are an artifact of squashing the thick rims of the red cells flat while making the slides. You see the same thick walls in all the red cells shown. The bat cells are more irregular in shape than the cat and human cells, like the aliens. Their size corresponds to the size of bat erythrocytes. I don't find anything that doesn't fit. Personally, I'm pretty well convinced that's what the aliens are: murdered bats. Helicopters? Jet intakes? Spores of any kind are pretty much out of the question since the spores of all sporulating life are a DNA delivery system, and these aliens have no DNA. I'm afraid the only aliens we could work into this picture would be aliens who slaughter bats in large numbers for sport. Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Any interesting (?) Chinese tektite
Hi, Norm, List, I too thought of carnival glass. The process of carnival glass making goes back to the 1880's (at least). You sprinkle a fresh hot glass object straight from the mold or furnace with (powdered) slag containing a variety of mineral salts and stick it back in the furnace briefly to obtain the iridescence. The color range depends on the minerals used. The purple- blue-goldish iridescence is a popular one for decorative art glass. The story is that the process was discovered by accident, dropping a fresh piece in slag dust and then trying to burn it off. In modern manufacturing techniques, the iridescence is created by adding metalic oxides into the hot glass while being formed and spraying the metallic salt solution to the still hot surface, subsequently re-firing it in the kiln. It was the eventual melting of the salts that created the rainbow colors of iridescence. Taking an existing tektite and carnivalizing it would be very difficult because you'd have to heat the tektite to an almost molten state, and the result would be iridescence on the outer most high points rather than in the bottom of the pits. Also it would be a strange thing to do; why? A warehouse fire might be hot enough, but where would the mineral salts come from? The box on the shelf above? Since it has to happen when the tektite is hot, semi-molten, the least-effort explanation that it fell originally on ground which had some naturally occuring mineral salt. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Norm Lehrman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: MARK BOSTICK [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 9:55 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Any interesting (?) Chinese tektite Mark list, About five years ago, as Cookie and I were helping our main Chinese supplier unpack at Tucson we found a couple of dozen like you have pictured. The coloration is a surface patina like Carnival Glass. We never determined how it formed, but I have seen similar patinas developed on ghost town glass that has been through a fire. I always suspected that the tektites might have been through a warehouse fire. Others suggested that an overly aggressive acid treatment was used in cleaning, but I've tried a variety of acids over the years and have never seen anything like this happen. Ironically, we were just commenting between us this year that it is strange that we have never seen the phenomena again. Not a single piece. This convinces me we are talking about some non-natural feature. To find 20 or 30 in one crate, then no more in something on the order of 50,000 to 75,000 pieces that we have subsequently sorted certainly provides a clue. I looked into the commercial production of carnival glass, but I don't remember the whole story. Something about sublimation of a metal film on hot glass. If you want to pursue the subject, look into that manufacturing process for more clues. As I recall, I sold all our pieces to a single collector in Texas. We openly expressed our concerns that this was probably not a natural phenomenon. Regards, Norm http://tektitesource.com --- MARK BOSTICK [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello list, Hope everyone is doing well. This may or may not be interesting, as it may or may not be that unusual. However, I have sorted through and sold a lot of tektites over the years and this is the only tektite like it I have seen. A nice average sized dumbell tektite http://www.meteoritearticles.com/coltektitechin76g.html Photographs were taken under white photograph lights in a room with white walls. The color is more obvious in person and was hard to reproduce digitally. On the ends and in the surface dimples, you can see a very striking blue color. The ends also show a little purple color, but more of the blue. Not sure what has caused this colorling. Any thoughts? Clear Skies, Mark Bostick Wichita, Kansas www.meteoritearticles.com __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Made It!
Hi, Just heard (on NPR) that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has arrived safely at Mars, insertion went fine, and contact has been recovered from it in orbit (sound of much cheering). Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] How to discover asteroid impacts
Hi, Darren, List I've been searching the desert for additional craters, too. Here's a couple more candidates beside the two mentioned on the astroseti.org website. Let me stress that I am neither a geologist nor an aerial photointerpreter, so these are just what looks good to me. First, 37 miles WSW of the newly noticed Kebira crater, at 24 deg 34' North and 24 deg 24' East, is a 2.57 mile crater. It has no central uplift and has been cut by ancient stream courses, so that its interior is at the same level as the surrounding terrain. The rim is raised 100 to 300 feet. There are fairly clear traces of an outer ring with a diameter of approximately 9 miles. The ancient eroded outcrops in which it lies all have features that run a little west (east) of north (south). The crater's arcuate features cut right across the lie of the land. Frankly, it looks as much (or more) like a crater than Kebira itself. The imagery I can access is not detailed enough to examine the rim for upturned strata. Secondly, at 22 deg North and 16.5 deg East, there are a number of features that are eliptical in nature stretching to the west of the indicated location. This is a region in which old outcrops running almost north-south are being submerged in the Great Sand Sea. Many features are irregular ovals filled with sand to the same level as the surrounding terrain, are probably former ancient lakes, and lie at the margins of the outcrops, as you would expect lakes to do. But the first of them, at 22 deg North and 16.5 deg East, is chopped right across and completely through a prominent outcrop. It is an very regular ellipse with a 5.1 mile major axis and a 3.9 mile minor axis. Its floor is 300 feet below the surrounding terrain (despite the blowing sand which should have filled it in, I would have thought). What makes me consider it a candidate is the way it is cut through the elevated eroded mountains like it was punched out by a giant cookie cutter, hardly the way (or place) a lake would have formed. This region is rife with circular features, of course, when viewed at a distance, but with closer inspection resemble true craters not at all. I've zoomed through 40 or 50 of them and these two are the only ones that seem to be craters (to me, at least). The List being replete with individuals with lots of geological expertise, tell me if you think there are more obvious explanations for these features than the energetic expression of a rock from space. Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Darren Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 9:53 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] How to discover asteroid impacts http://www.astroseti.org/impacts.php __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] How to discover asteroid impacts
Hi, Anne, Knowing that the crater field in SW Egypt has already been discovered, I didn't examine it. The first crater I listed is 35 miles inside Libya. Kebira itself lies right on the Egypt-Libya border, with about 60% of the crater lying in Libya. Whoever goes to poke and probe it will need the cooperation of TWO governments... Bon chance. The second candidate I listed is in Chad and is possibly reachable from the Aozou Airport, assuming you could ever get permission to fly in. Again, bon chance. The craters shown in the article are at such a small scale (1200 meters and down) that the search in, say, GoogleEarth, would be arduous. They're great little craters, though, and are pretty unmistakable when seen at ground level. And the shattercone photo is one of the best photos of shattercones in place that I've ever seen. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 10:12 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] How to discover asteroid impacts In a message dated 3/11/2006 8:57:48 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi, Darren, List I've been searching the desert for additional craters, too. Here's a couple more candidates beside the two mentioned on the astroseti.org website. Let me stress that I am neither a geologist nor an aerial photointerpreter, so these are just what looks good to me. First, 37 miles WSW of the newly noticed Kebira crater, at 24 deg 34' North and 24 deg 24' East, is a 2.57 mile crater. It has no central uplift and has been cut by ancient stream courses, so that its interior is at the same level as the surrounding terrain. The rim is raised 100 to 300 feet. There are fairly clear traces of an outer ring with a diameter of approximately 9 miles. The ancient eroded outcrops in which it lies all have features that run a little west (east) of north (south). The crater's arcuate features cut right across the lie of the land. Frankly, it looks as much (or more) like a crater than Kebira itself. The imagery I can access is not detailed enough to examine the rim for upturned strata. Secondly, at 22 deg North and 16.5 deg East, there are a number of features that are eliptical in nature stretching to the west of the indicated location. This is a region in which old outcrops running almost north-south are being submerged in the Great Sand Sea. Many features are irregular ovals filled with sand to the same level as the surrounding terrain, are probably former ancient lakes, and lie at the margins of the outcrops, as you would expect lakes to do. SNIP -- --- For more information on that area, did you look on my website at the report published by a French Expedition: http://www.impactika.com/acarion.html And the article in the August issue of Meteorite magazine, written by Alain Carion. They have already found upward of 100 impact craters in that area. Some are clearly visible on the pictures. Enjoy! Anne M. Black www.IMPACTIKA.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] President, I.M.C.A. Inc. www.IMCA.cc __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Volcanic Gases, Not Meteors, May Have Caused Mass Extinctions
Hi, More information on the eleven flood basalt events that have happened in the last 250,000,000 years can be found at: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=fbasalts The fact that there are only eleven such events in that length of time indicates that these events are not a normal, i.e., gradual and on-going geological process, but may have a specific incidental cause (like an impact?). One explanation of how a major impact could cause a flood basalt event is by decompression melting: http://www.mantleplumes.org/Impacts.html Decompression melting is easy to understand; just try suddenly removing the lid from a working pressure cooker! (Don't really try this. You could be injured. My lawyer made me write this parenthesis.) However, it's a little hard to support the idea that flood basalts occur at the point of impact when you look at the coincidental timing of the Chicxulub impact and the Deccan Traps, unless you believe there were two impacts. And, indeed, the two impact scenario has been proposed. (If you're going to argue for decades, it's good to have lots of things to argue about!) I have always favored the notion that the Traps occur at the point on the globe directly opposite the point of impact, by the focusing of shock waves at the antipodes. The solar system has examples of this phenomenon, like the chaotic terrain on Mercury opposite the great Caloris Basin. Even our little Moon shows some fracture features opposite the Imbrium Basin. And the case has been made for some features on Mars. Googling up a storm while the List was down, I found most geologists utterly contemptuous of this idea. Naturally, this made me like it better. I found that their major objection to this is that the location of the Traps is NOT precisely antipodal to the impact sites. There is a heralded claim by a prominent geologist that the offset between the Chicxulub impact and the Deccan Traps was 30 degrees or even 50 degrees. So, I tried to find what their LatLong was 65 million years ago, only to find that every reconstructor of past continental drift comes up with a slightly different answer, varying from a perfect antipodal match to about 50 degrees off. Hmm. Next, it was off to Seismology to study the focusing of shock waves which of course is, in a mild way, what Seismology is all about. After a certain amount of puzzling over diagrams showing perfect antipodal focus, it dawned on me. In all cases, Seismology assumes all forces to be normal (orthogonal) to the surface of the Earth. They are, in an earthquake, but... This corresponds to an impact event only when the Big Rock comes straight down from the zenith, a 90 degree impact. But, as we know, this is an unlikely scenario for an impact. http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/10197028-5vKwmj/webviewable/10197028.pdf Searching around to see what would happen if you struck the Earth at an angle, like an impactor almost certainly would, I discovered that -- yes, oblique impact shifts the direction of the shock waves and the location of the antipodal focus.* This displacement of the primary focus of the shock waves is almost as great as the angle of incidence, because they are orthogonal -- to the impactor, not the Earth. So, antipodal can be anywhere from less than 135 degrees up to 180 degrees from the point of impact. This shifts the meaning of antipodal considerably. Still, geologists seem to be terribly annoyed by the suggestion that impacts could have seismic or volcanic effects. In my simple- minded way, I look at it like this. The Earth is a ball of rock. (OK, it has a delicious molten center, but mostly it's a ball of rock.) Rock is defined as a crystal. That's what rocks are: crystals, maybe not all gemmy, but crystals nevertheless. Take a hammer and hit a crystal, very lightly at first but getting more energetic. At some point, effects will commence. What happens? Well, cracks, for a start. Forces in the crust (and mantle) are in equilibrium, a meta-stable condition. How much does it take to disturb an equilibrium of contained and constrained forces? Only a fraction of the total forces in the equilibrium. If you like really whacky geologic notions, try Googling Verneshot! The triggering of catastrophic vulcanism also goes a long way to answering the question, Exactly HOW did this asteroid kill the dinosaurs? It effectively sucks up all of the vulcanism effects into the list of things that would be caused by the impact. That full list of global nasties ought to be enough to kill those dino guys. You hear so many that-couldn't-kill- ALL-the-dinosaurs objections that you half expect to bump into a raptor in the woods... All I know is I haven't seen too many of them (outside of their wonderful movies) lately... Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List
Re: [meteorite-list] Impact Structures - Simple vs Complex?
Hi, Jeff, List, The crater categories are: 1. simple 2. complex-immature 3. complex-mature 4. central peaked crater 5. peak ring basin (two ring crater) 6. multi-ring basin The factors determining which crater results from an impact are, in order of importance: 1. gravity at the surface 2. strength of the materials of the surface 3. total energy of the impact On Earth the transition from simple to complex occurs between a one mile crater and a three mile crater. On Mars the transition from simple to complex occurs between a 2-1/2 mile crater and a 6 mile crater. On the Moon the transition from simple to complex occurs between a 8 mile crater and a 20 mile crater. When there is a significant impact, at first there is just a huge blown out hole, called the transient crater cavity. In the right materials, on the right body, the crater might just fill back in, leaving only a circular wrinkle on the surface. If the center of the impact re-bounds strongly, there is a central peak. In most craters the original steep walls slump, shallowing the crater. The Moon's original crust (the highlands) was struck with impacts that produced giant basins, both multi-ringed and flooded. The lunar crust was probably only 40 to 60 miles thick at that time. Yet, despite producing basins 1,000 kilometers or more across, no sample from the Moon has any mantle rock in it, so it seems that even the biggest impacts don't dig deeply into the planet. Instead, they heat and melt vast areas of surface. The Earth's impact with the Moon's parent body, and the subsequent in-fall of debris, probably re-melted the Earth's crust to a depth of ten miles or more, perhaps re-melting the entire crust right down to the mantle. (Just when it had gotten all solid and settled, too.) Yet, there is a NASA pic of a so-called zap pit on a glass spherule from the Apollo 11 soil samples, a tiny BB of glass that got hit with something even smaller, which left a little bitty crater. The zap pit is a ring basin and it's only 30 microns across! So, the true answer to your question as to how big a crater has to get to become a complex crater is: Well, that all depends... Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Jeff Kuyken [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 6:01 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Impact Structures - Simple vs Complex? Here's a question for those of you more familiar with impact structures on Earth. I believe I saw somewhere that craters fall into 2 main categories? simple and Complex with the later having a central uplift, concentric rings, etc among other things. My question is: How small can a complex crater be? Is there a definitive size restraint or does it completely depend on a multitude of variables such as the make-up of the impacting body, velocity, impact angle, target rock, etc? Any help is appreciated, Jeff Kuyken Meteorites Australia www.meteorites.com.au __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] New Theory: Global Warming CausedbyTunguskaEvent / climate change - ~ot
, pack the FUR bikini...) About 30 miles north of my house in S. Illinois, there was a white wall about half a mile high, stretching across the landscape for hundreds of miles... About 14,000 years ago, things began to warm up, and after some fits and starts, the continental glaciers went away, only 10,300 years ago, initiating our present summer vacation from the ice age. It's an interesting number because these warm spells only last for about 11,000 years. Some are as short as 8,000 years and every once in a while, they last for up to 20,000 years (the last time that happened was 130,000 years ago). But (always a hitch, isn't there?) no one is really certain why. There are great arguments about the orbital timing, about which cycle influences which climatic factor, and so forth. So, the discouraging thing is that summer vacation may be almost over. Well, you say discontentedly, it's not like they were going to throw a switch and -- presto! -- it's an Ice Age. Gee, I hate to really disappoint you, but it may very well be that it's exactly like that. For decades, evidence has been accumulating of a very rapid turnover in conditions, as short or shorter than the uncertainties in the dating methods used to observe it. The last I heard, somebody had been able to pinpoint a major climatic shift in an ice core that happened in less than three years! The switch is oceanic currents which transport warmth from the equator toward the poles, particularly in the northern hemisphere. Stop those currents, break the circulation pattern, and it's just like throwing a switch. Some of you may recall a 2004 movie, The Day After Tomorrow, which was widely pounded by critics as The Dog of All Time. It seems to have particularly annoyed a generation brought up on the Global Warming Faith. Well, quite apart from intrinsic artistic merit (mediocre), there was absolutely nothing in that movie that couldn't happen, albeit a little slower and with less drama. Frozen solid in a week, frozen solid in a year; not really more convenient... Rob said: I would consider an ice age worse than the present... but I don't think anyone is too concerned about it happening in the next century... Rob, if you're making a list of the concerned, you can put me at the top of it. You see, there are both hot and cold running varieties of Chicken Little. Paradoxically, global warming may contribute to sudden cooling. Increased Arctic melt could trigger a shutoff of the warm mid-level currents by disrupting their northern upwelling, which could cause a 7 to 12 degree drop in temperature in a matter of months. The one indisputable thing one can say about our warm interglacial episode is that it won't last. They never do. Yes, someday, our millions of years of ice age will end, things will get back to normal, and we can vacation in the rain forests of Antarctica once again, but that day is not now, and it is not tomorrow. Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: mark ford [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 2:46 AM Subject: RE: [meteorite-list] New Theory: Global Warming CausedbyTunguskaEvent / climate change - ~ot Hi Rob, Well, 'Worse' meaning, the entire world's landmass that is currently at 5 meters or below, above sea level, most probably won't be I'd say that would be a start :) Of course you might argue it won't effect 'us', but then why do we bother having kids? They key at the moment is 'they' just have no idea what will happen and when, the theories seem to range from 'global cooling' to 'complete catastrophe' unless they can model it in enough detail, there are just too many factors to get answers. The earth is warmer now than it has been for many million of years, and the rate of warming is accelerating. - will it be a problem?, who knows. Can we do anything about it? Probably not, but unless we have some idea about what is going on we will never know if there is something we should be doing. Countires need to start thinking about planning for sea level rise and especially air stream changes, since it often takes many decades to change country wide infrastructure, - for example people still seem intent on building on flood plains. Whilst I don't attribute it to global warming, Here in Southern Britain we are currently facing the worst drought for 80 years, rainfall is way way below average, and we have a hosepipe ban in place (and yes it is still winter!), I can imagine what could happen if global warming really did happen... Best, Mark -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:55 PM To: mark ford; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Subject: RE: [meteorite-list] New Theory: Global Warming Caused byTunguskaEvent / climate change Mark suggested: On the same note, I invite
Re: [meteorite-list] Did Earth Seed Life Elsewhere in the Solar System?
Hi, Panspermia in reverse? Jeff Moore [says] Once one planet comes down with life, they all get it. Reminds me of a cartoon I saw over 20 years ago (and taped to my refrigerator until it fell apart) of an anthromorphised Mars saying to an anthromorphised Earth, I don't how to tell you this, but you've got some kind of parasite on you... If, in the Gladman simulation, 30 Earth rocks get to Titan in 5 million simulated years, that's 6 Earth rocks per million years. Over the life of the solar system, that's 27,000 microbe bearing Earth rocks for the Titan environment. Makes it sound like a favored holiday destination of Earthly microbes... Interestingly, Freeman Dyson wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly (Nov, 1997) Warm-Blooded Plants and Freeze-Dried Fish, which used to be viewable on-line and now is not without payment. I quote some of it: Every time a major impact occurs on Europa, a vast quantity of water is splashed from the ocean into the space around Jupiter. Some of the water evaporates, and some condenses into snow. Creatures living in the water far enough from the impact have a chance of being splashed into space and quickly freeze-dried. Therefore, an easy way to look for evidence of life in Europa's ocean is to look for freeze-dried fish in the ring of space debris orbiting Jupiter. And perhaps some of the impact splash escapes Jupiter orbit altogether? Heading which way? I wish Gladman had modeled the reverse case. What are the odds of something splashed up out of Europa arriving on Earth? I'm remembering Ron Baalke's recent post of the article on Weird Rains with its falls of fish, alligators and cows. Any falls of ALIEN fish? Would anyone even recognize an Europan fish as alien? Some of the things that are found in Earth's oceans look pretty alien to me, like benthic fishes. Excuse me, but... you're not from around here, are you? Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 1:03 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Did Earth Seed Life Elsewhere in the Solar System? http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060313/full/060313-18.html Did Earth seed life elsewhere in the Solar System? Impacts on our planet could have sprayed life into space. Mark Peplow nature.com March 17, 2006 Earthly bacteria could have reached distant planets and moons after being flung into space by massive meteorite impacts, scientists suggest. The proposal neatly reverses the panspermia theory, which suggests that life on Earth was seeded by microbes on comets or meteorites from elsewhere. Both theories envision life spreading through the Solar System in much the same way that germs race around a crowded classroom, says Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Once one planet comes down with life, they all get it. Spreading germs Impacts on Mars and the Moon are known to throw rocks into space that end up on Earth as small meteorites. But spraying Earth rocks towards the edges of the Solar System is more difficult, because the material has to move away from the Sun's strong gravity. To find out just how many rocks could reach the outer Solar System, a team of scientists used a computer model to track millions of fragments ejected by a simulated massive impact, such as the one that created the Chicxulub crater some 65 million years ago. Similar sized events are thought to have happened a few times in Earth's history. The researchers looked in part at how many Earthly fragments would reach environments thought to be relatively well suited to life, such as Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa. I assumed the answer would be very, very few, says Brett Gladman, a planetary scientist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, who led the team. But Gladman was surprised to find that within 5 million years, about 100 objects would hit Europa, while Titan gets roughly 30 hits. He presented the results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas, on 16 March. Tough journey But could bacteria survive the sudden heat and acceleration of being thrown into space? Other researchers at the conference suggest that they can. Wayne Nicholson, a microbiologist from the University of Florida in Gainesville, has tested the idea with a gun the size of a house at NASA's Ames Research Center. He and his colleagues fired a marble-sized pellet at about 5 kilometres per second into a plate that contained bacterial spores in water, in order to simulate a meteorite impact. The debris that scattered upwards was caught in sheets of foam, and the team found that about one in 10,000 bacteria survived. It's an experimental validation of a fairly well established calculation, says Moore. Crash landing Many astrobiologists
[meteorite-list] Re: A curse for you all, Alien techno kindergarten.
Hi, Kevin, Here's a fistful of answers to your puzzle: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/61087.html http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/triangles.htm http://www.nobeliefs.com/puzzles/triangle-puzzle.htm (They want you to contribute before they tell you the answer...) http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/QQ/database/QQ.09.99/matthews1.html http://www.puzzle.dse.nl/harder/index_us.html#appearing_area And here's the website your friend got the picture from, only he didn't give you the answer, which is on the same website: http://home.earthlink.net/~toddwolly/vision/triangle.html Stop suffering... Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Kevin Forbes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 6:05 PM Subject: A curse for you all, Alien techno kindergarten. You will, no doubt, feel exhilaration as you discover that you can actually do it, and it works repeatedly. You will want to run and show your friends this new discovery. Then you will try to figure it out. You will fail. You will then go slightly crazy or mad. You may even be compelled to hold your head and sob. You will then feel pain as logic escapes you totally. I will save you. http://www.qsl.net/vk3ukf/variableT.html If any of the lists facilitators of knowledge are able to end my suffering of some 2 years regards this problem, I would love to hear from you. Thanks all, Kevin, VK3UKF. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Earth Rocks Could Have Taken Life to Titan (doubts)
or no ablative friction. The many studies of Martian meteorites show low or minimal levels of shock and heating, and so forth, nothing to indicate a violent mechanism of ejection, so there must be a more effective and less stressful mechanism than raw blasting power. Anyone else want to design a conveyor? Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Mike Fowler [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: Mike Fowler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 11:18 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Earth Rocks Could Have Taken Life to Titan (doubts) He says only boulders at least 3 metres across could punch out through the Earth's atmosphere and escape the planet's gravity, and that only extremely powerful impacts could achieve this. The cause of such impacts would be comets or asteroids between 10 and 50 kilometres wide, Gladman told New Scientist: The kind of thing that killed the dinosaurs. I have my doubts. (again) Someone please correct me if I err in my numbers or logic. A rock being ejected into space is somewhat like a meteorite falling to Earth, but in reverse. To be ejected into space the rock must leave Earth's atmosphere with escape velocity. That means, it must have been accelerated to a velocity GREATER than escape velocity to account for the velocity lost punching thru Earths atmosphere. Question #1 Can an impact accelerate rocks greater than 3 meters in diameter to 15 kilometers per second,or more, without shock melting them, or pulverizing them? Meteorites entering the Earth's atmosphere push ahead of them a column of air until the pressure on the meteorite exceeds the crushing strength of the meteorite, at which point it explodes and the surviving pieces fall under the influence of gravity. Question #2 If a whole rock, 3 meters or more in diameter, could be accelerated to 15 kps intact, wouldn't the back pressure of the atmosphere exceed the strength of the rock resulting in fragmentation into pieces, just as happens to virtually all stony meteorites passing thru the Earth's atmosphere with similar velocity? Such pieces will not coast into space, on the contrary they will be retarded by the remaining atmosphere, and quickly loose escape velocity. I would never say something is impossible. But I have my doubts about hundreds of millions of Earth Boulders being ejected thru the atmosphere unless you can overcome the above 2 objections. Any comments Sterling or others? Mike Fowler Chicago __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Kabira Crater Story on NPR
Hi, National Public Radio ran a segment today on the discovery of the Kabira crater by Farouk El Baz, with an interview with him. It's 3 min 39 sec and doesn't contain too many errors. It refers to desert glass but not by its technical name (Libyan Desert Glass), and says it was discovered 70 years ago, which is silly, since it was described scientifically in 1850 and has been known since paleolithic times. You can listen to the segment at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5297311 Click the Listen button. Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] First_Images_from_MRO
Hi, The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sent back its first images in a test of the Hirez camera, including the first full-resolution image. The high speed sweep system works and the images are very sharp. The images can be found at: http://news.com.com/2300-11397_3-6053635-1.html The full rez image (page two of the article) has 98 inches to the pixel. When the orbit is lowered and circularized, the resolution will be 11 inches to the pixel. And, yes, Mars' surface looks different when the pictures are sharper and more detailed. Nothing like more detail... Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Professor Rejects Meteor Theory of Carolina Bays'Origin
Hi, Fewer subjects have had more idiocy babbled about them than the Carolina Bays. This analysis is a perfect example. If I wanted an expert opinion on the meteoritic origin of an enigmatic geological feature, who better to go than a BOTANIST? He, for example, cites the clustering of the bays as a non-impact feature since everybody knows meteorites are random. Will somebody please tell this jerk what a strewn field is? I suggest you look at this summary of impact evidence: http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cbayint.html This is a fairly well-done piece by a couple of graduate students in Geography at the University of Illinois, despite a few bouts with foot-in-mouth disease, such as the area where Carolina Bays are abundant adjoins a large area from Alabama to Virginia, including much of Tennessee and Kentucky, where meteorites are abundant. Yup, there's a lot of bolides up in them thar hills... There is no conventional meteoritic evidence: No meteoritic fragments have been found that are genetically related to the Carolina Bays. No known meteorite falls elsewhere in the world have resulted in approximately half a million depressions over a wide area. Studies of magnetic anomalies associated with individual bays are not conclusive (MacCarthy, 1936; Prouty, 1952). Shatter cones and high pressure changes in quartz grains associated with known impact craters are absent. The heavy mineralogy of sediments within one bay did not differ from sediments beyond the bay rim (Preston and Brown, 1964). On the other hand, geology seems to both flounder and flourish with explanations. Marine theories include sand bar dams across drowned valleys (Glenn, 1895); swales in underwater sand dunes (Glenn, 1895); submarine scour by eddies, currents and undertow (Melton, 1934); progressive lagoon segmentation (Cooke, 1934); gyroscopic eddies (Cooke, 1940; 1954); and fish nests created by the simultaneous waving of fish fins in unison over submarine artesian springs (Grant, 1945). Subaerial hypotheses include artesian spring sapping (Toumey, 1848); peat burning by paleo-Indians (Wells and Boyce, 1953); eolian deflation and/or deposition (Raisz, 1934; Price, 1951, 1958, 1968; and Carson and Hussey, 1962); solution (Johnson, 1936; Lobeck, 1939; Le Grand, 1953; and Shockley and others, 1956); periglacial thaw lakes Wolfe, 1953); wind deflation combined with perched water tables and lake shore erosion at a 90o angle to the prevailing wind (Thom, 1970); artesian spring sapping and eolian deposition (Johnson, 1936); and progressive lagoon segmentation modified by eolian processes stabilized by climatic changes (Price, 1951, 1958, 1968). Myself, I like the simultaneous waving of fish fins as an explanation of an enigmatic geological feature. I can see it now, done as a cartoon ballet in the style of Disney's Fantasia. Now, THAT'S Real Science! Backing up on that URL above will get you a whole menu of sites about the Carolina Bays, many of them seriously whacko, but that's what you get with unexplained phenomena on the Internet. Their key mysterious features are their number (half a million of them), their regularity of form, their common orientation, their extreme shallowness, their low rim heights. The two geographers settle on air-bursts from shallow trajectory cometary fragments as the most likely origin (which I think beats out the fish-fin theory). But it's hard to picture a half million Tunguskas! An orbital swarm of a half million mini-Tunguskas is a pretty frightening picture. It is also worth noting that all the geological theories of their origins are based on the erroneous notion that the Carolina Bays are all to be found in only one type of geological terrain, the coastal plains. But they have since been found in other terrain types, which effectively rules out most of the prior geological theories (except for those fish fins, of course). I love a Mystery. Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:46 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Professor Rejects Meteor Theory of Carolina Bays'Origin http://www.thetandd.com/articles/2006/03/28/news/doc4428a99f752a6396001544.txt Mysterious wetlands Citadel professor rejects meteor theory of Carolina bays' origin By S.W. SHOPTAW The Times and Democrat March 28, 2006 Were they formed by the impact of a meteor striking the Earth or are they merely sink holes? The answer to how Carolina bays were formed is not something about which scientists agree. Carolina bays are geological depressions of mysterious origin that occur throughout the Coastal Plain of the Carolinas and Georgia. They take their name from the evergreen bay trees that typically characterize them. On March 19, Dr. Richard Porcher, a professor of biology and director
Re: [meteorite-list] Part2: Professor Rejects Meteor Theory of CarolinaBays' Origin
Paul, Depends on what you mean by common. Rather than parallel orientation, I referred to orientation relative to a radiant point, which orientation is more consistent. I also was not wed to the notion of a single cometary event breaking up into 500,000 objects! It is quite possible to have a cometary stream that intersects the Earth's orbit at regular intervals. Or to have an object or objects captured by the Earth in low orbit decaying on successive passes, events unlikely but not impossible. It's a big universe. In any event, the radiants of multiple impact events need not be any more regular than the orientation of the Bays. It's not diagnostic. Their regularity of form is quite remarkable for a natural feature, however. The Alaska lakes Eric Olsen provided a link to are very much more irregular than the Bays and indeed most lakes and ponds are. The paleowind theory that is so popular as the cause of the elipticity doesn't seem to account for the fact that to get perfect elipses you have to start with perfect circles just as regular. Wind stretching would exaggerate prior irregularities. This leaves the regularity problem untouched. Geometric regularity is not characteristic of local features, formed locally, and influenced by local factors. Simple mathematical forms are rare: the cone of a new ashy volcano, the circularity of coral atolls, the geometry of dune fields. True, lakes in low lying, flat, uniformly soft soils are more regular, but the Bays are oddly too regular. Those rim dates correspond to re-glaciation (36,000 yr), cold peak (25,000 yr), melting (11,600 yr), so maybe the Bays are a glacial feature whose mechanism we just haven't figured out yet. At the time, this was a cold, windy place, with much less plant cover, particularly trees, more like the northern Great Plains than the semi-tropical Carolinas of today. Does anybody like giant Pleistocene beavers as a candidate? If you assume certain behavioral differences from the modern species, like building regular embayments out of gravel, sand, and mud instead of log dams (no trees!). I suppose you could easily hypothesize any behavior, since Pleistocene beavers are extinct and can hardly object to our speculations! Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 1:53 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Part2: Professor Rejects Meteor Theory of CarolinaBays' Origin Susan Web wrote: NOTE: STERLING WEBB wrote: Their key mysterious features are their number (half a million of them), their regularity of form, their common orientation, their extreme shallowness, their low rim heights. Their common orientation is not as consistent as the proponents of an impact origin falsely claim them to be. In the southern and northern ends of their distribution, the long axis of Carolina Bays actually show a wide range of orientations, which fails to support either an air-burst or impact origin. Within the middle range of their distribution, the orientation of the Carolina Bays are consistent with Pleistocene paleowind directions as determined from ancient dune fields, loess distribution patterns, and paleoclimate models. I would find it quite remarkable that either a meteorite or comet would take the time and trouble to plan its impact as to perfectly coincide with the prevailing winds at the time it hit like an airplane landing at an airport. The wide spread of orientations at the northern and southern ends of their distributions is also consistent with what is known about the variability of Pleistocene paleowind patterns over time. Another and major problem, which the proponents of either an impact or air-burst origin is that the shape, orientation, and depth of the Carolina Bays have been altered by over a 100,000 years of modification by eolian and lacustrine processes. For example, Ivester et al. (2003) found that the multiple sand rims found within Big Bay in South Carolina become progressively younger towards the center of this Carolina Bay. In this case, Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dates from sand rims starting from the outer rim to the inner rim produced a perfectly chronologically consistent set dates of 35,660±2600; 25,210±1900; 11,160±900; and 2,150±300 years BP. In this case, the Big Bay has shrunk by 1.6 km over the last 36,000 years, with rims being produced about 36,000 BP, 25,000 BP, 11,000 BP, and 2,000 BP as it shrunk. If a person wants to argue that these sand rims are of impact or air-burst origin, they need to explain how either impacts or air-bursts managed to precisely excavate tens of thousand of years apart sucessive craters in precise center of Big Bay and similar Carolina Bays and with ever decreasing energy as to produce sand rims of smaller and smaller diameter, which are nicely nested within each other. Their nothing mysterious about
Re: [meteorite-list] More Evidence Chicxulub Was Too Early
Hi, Can't tell the players without a program! Harting is Keller's collaborator. For the other side of the fuss, see Smits website: http://www.geo.vu.nl/~smit/csdp/debates.htm This site is for folks who like specifics, cores, thin sections, and lots of argument. Keller-Harting get lots of press, but nobody is convinced by them but them... The press loves a fuss. I think we ought to sort out all the exact mechanisms of extinctions so as to better understand the dangers of various kinds of objects, but Keller's problem is this: is that 300,000 years really only 30 years? 300 years? 3000 years? Can they prove it's 300,000 years? (No.) But even if it is... You're on the jury. The accused freely admits to having plugged the deceased a number of times with large caliber bullets. BUT, and here's the crucial point (he says), none of those wounds were mortal. The late Mr. Victim was alive and screaming when he left him. In fact, Mr Victim didn't die until many hours later, while the accused was enjoying the veal with his friend Mr. Soprano. AND the victim didn't die from gunshot wounds at all! No, no, he died from some mysterious blood loss. Here the accused smiles winningly, so youse can see I din't have nuttin' ta do wid it! Convince you? Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 7:25 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] More Evidence Chicxulub Was Too Early http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/06-14.htm News Release 29 March 2006 GSA Release No. 06-14 Contact: Ann Cairns, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Director-Communications and Marketing (303) 357-1056, fax 303-357-1074 More Evidence Chicxulub Was Too Early Boulder, Colo. - A new study of melted rock ejected far from the Yucatan's Chicxulub impact crater bolsters the idea that the famed impact was too early to have caused the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A careful geochemical fingerprinting of glass spherules found in multiple layers of sediments from northeast Mexico, Texas, Guatemala, Belize and Haiti all point back to Chicxulub as their source. But the analysis places the impact at about 300,000 years before the infamous extinctions that mark the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, a.k.a. the K-T boundary. Using an array of electron microscopy techniques, Markus Harting of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands has found that chemical compositions of the spherules all match what would be expected of rocks melted at the Chicxulub impact. The spherules are now found in several layers because after they originally hit the ground, they were reworked by erosion to create later layers of sediments, he said. It's this reworking long after the impact that has misplaced some of the spherules into sediments that, based on the fossils in the same sediments, are misleadingly close to the K-T boundary. Harting is scheduled to present his latest findings on Monday, 3 April Backbone of the Americas-Patagonia to Alaska. The meeting is co-convened by the Geological Society of America and the Asociación Geológica Argentina, with collaboration of the Sociedad Geológica de Chile. The meeting takes place 3-7 April in Mendoza, Argentina. The whole story is that it's a single impact event, said Harting of his analysis of the multiple spherule layers. In fact, the original spherule layer is not particularly hard to make out, since its spherules are not as abraded and damaged as those which were moved around and re-deposited in later, higher sediments. Above these, and younger still, Harting has also identified the famous layer of extraterrestrial iridium in sediments worldwide which was originally touted as the smoking gun for an impact somewhere on Earth at the K-T boundary. In most of the sections we found spherules we also found the iridium layer at or near the K-T boundary, said Harting. That makes the mismatch with Chicxulub even more obvious. The sediments from the region are also providing clues to what transpired during those 300,000 years between the impact and the K-T boundary die-offs. Nothing happened between them, said Harting. The K-T iridium layer is a totally different event. Disconnecting the Chicxulub impact from the K-T boundary also helps make sense of some other oddities in the iridium layer. In the Gulf of Mexico, close to the impact site, iridium is found at a weak concentration, just one part per billion, says Harting. Yet farther away in Denmark, higher concentrations of iridium are found. This doesn't really make sense, he said, unless, of course, the impact and iridium layer are not related. All this begs the question: What, then, created the worldwide iridium layer, if not a humongous impact? One possibility is that Earth and perhaps the entire solar system was passing through a thick cloud
[meteorite-list] Re: Multiple Impact and 73P(was..More Evidence Chicxulub..)
at 700 mph... And this is a little, even trifling impact, unless of course, you happen to be there at the time. If we knew one was going to happen, maybe the author of the press release that said impacts aren't catastrophes should test that theory by standing there. Definitely a life-changer, I would think. A chunk only 140 meters is still an airburst, but the energy released is 270 megatons only 7000 feet up. The devastation is much greater. A 150 meter chunk reaches the ground in pieces traveling about 7000 mph. The impact energy is down to 1.6 megatons but it leaves a strewn field with multiple craters, the largest being about 1500 feet. A 200 meter ice chunk impacts at 8 megatons and leaves a crater twice the size of Arizona's Meteor Crater and 1500 feet deep. I'm really glad they've identified all the chunks bigger than 500 meters (10,000 megatons and a five-mile crater), but how many nasty little pieces do you suppose there are? Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 2:58 PM Subject: Multiple Impact and 73P(was..More Evidence Chicxulub..) Sterling W. writes: Keller-Harting get lots of press, but nobody is convinced by them but them... Hola Sterling, That isn't entirely true. Gerta and her many European and Mexican collaborators have done much superb chonostratigraphic detective work and have been quite influential and have at least 15 years of solid science they've built. That the original theorists have every right to defend for their dramatic extinction scenario hypothesis is fine and healthy to a point, but the devil is hiding in the details, and Marcus Harding's work takes this to a new level by attempting a look further at morphology and chemistry like has not been done before. That is a good thing and these are exactly the type of folks needed since the geological record is so...errr...fragmented in the critical scheme of evaluating the hypothesis of the Nobel Prize winning Hollywood Impact Theory. This work is fresh research on a question that is so complicated that other researcher's won't touch since the possibility of successfully nailing it is slim after all of these 65.X million years. The fact the the press and more importantly the scientists themselves seem to be vocally passionate about their hypotheses does not excuse the true inconclusivity of the evidence for the accepted theory which merits keeping the issue on the table for the mainstream. Dr. Keller wisely sticks to her paleontological expertise, but if you have had an opportunity to discuss this with her you will know that her thinking regarding the killer asteroid scenario is quite refreshing and robust. The idea that multiple impacts ocurred doesn't seem to far fetched, and we can basically thank them for introducing it as potentially more viable and consistent based on top-notch fieldwork, not just astronomical mullings. If you want to dream up a nice scenario just look at the two dozen large pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy that pummelled Jupiter for over a week. Of course, Jupiter has pretty high-test fishing line compared to Earth and can land these beasts on the first try. So, let's have fun in about a month with some binoculars where you'll see two cometary fragments from Comet 73P Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 on May 12 and 14 even from somewhat light polluted skies at nice, forgiving altitudes for backyard astronomers. Component C, apparently the main mass, passes 0.08 AU from earth first (on a sky trajectory before the 11th of May entering Vulpecula the Fox between the base of the cross of Cygnus the Swan and the second front leg of Pegasus the Flying Horse, and then less than two days later, at only 0.066 AU just about leaving Vulpecula and entering Pegasus another huge mountain of component B will be whizzing by. Some of these chunks are in the 500 meters to 1 kilometer diameter range. There are over a dozen killer chunks detected so far. Some good food for thought while there's still food and thought available:) Too bad NASA lost the CONTOUR spacecraft a month after it was launched in July 2002. If the heliocentric booster maneuver hadn't been a failure, on June 18, Contour (That's COmet TOUR, not COmetS:)) would have made the most dramatic flyby of 73P than anything we have yet witnessed in our fortuitous livespans... There'll be a basically moon out for 73P as it passes Earth most closely so unfortunately the binocular view won't be very astounding and may only catch the largest C fragment. The best time to see the comet if you are serious is on May 7 or 8 at about 3:30 AM local time. During this time the main mass of the comet will be visiting the small, bright parallalelogram in Lyra the Lyre. Just find Vega in Lyra, then the second brightest star
Re: [meteorite-list] Re: Mercury splattered Earth / little bit of aDeep Impact article
Hi, Doug, Darren, List The original simulation of interplanetary transfer by Gladman (The exchange of impact ejecta between terrestrial planets, by Brett J. Gladman, Joseph A. Burns, Martin Duncan, Pascal Lee and Harold F. Levison, Science, 1996) showed 0.5% of impact ejecta from Mercury reaching the Earth from a series of small varied individual impacts such as would produce interplanetary meteorites. I would imagine that one huge whack would be even more efficient at transferring material between planets, but even if it wasn't, the one huge whack would have removed a good percentage of Mercury's existing crust (thus accounting for its disporportionally large metallic core), perhaps 20% of the mass of the planet, or about 10^23 kg, or a little more than the mass of the Earth's Moon. One-half percent of that is 5 x 10^20 kg, or to write it out in full, 500,000,000,000,000,000 tons, which would amount to 1/10,000th of the present mass of the Earth (4 x 10^24 kg) more or less. Any one wishing a sample of the planet Mercury for analysis or investigation should just mail me $1000. I will immediately ship them a 23-pound box of rocks which will contain one full gram of Mercurian planetary sample material. All you will have to do is separate it from the other 9,999 grams. If I didn't charge at least $1000 per gram for Mercurian material, why, then the market would be in ruin! Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2006 4:30 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Re: Mercury splattered Earth / little bit of aDeep Impact article Hola Darren, Looks like someone at Space Daily didn't realize it is Space Weekly when dealing with the unionized press corps. It says it was an error and implies anyone promulgating it not a nice person, until the sindicated embargo Tuesday night is lifted. I guess we are only bottom feeders in the knowledge chain:) Thanks to you, now I'll be blue in the face waiting to see if this is hot air or cold fusion: Mercury's Formation Impact Splattered Earth With Material Leicester, UK (SPX) Mar 31, 2006 - New computer simulations of Mercury's formation show the fate of material blasted out into space when a large proto-planet collided with a giant asteroid 4.5 billion years ago. http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Mercurys_Formation_Impact_Splattered_Earth_W ith_Material.html which was another boo-boo by Space Daily that self destructed in the cache...until de-embargoed at the same time... Saludos, Doug Darren wrote: What you see on Google News: X-Rays Reveal 25 Tonnes Of Water Released By Deep Impact, Space Daily, CA - Mar 30, 2006 ... The Swift observations reveal that far ... The more material liberated, the more X-rays are produced ... total mass of water released by the impact was 250,000 tonnes But when you click the link, the article has been removed, and googlecache doesn't have it. http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/X_Rays_Reveal_25_Tonnes_Of_Water_Released_By_Deep_Impact.html __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Early Mercury Impact Showered Earth
the multitude of iron and iron/rock asteroids now found in the Asteroid Zone all come originally from the inner Solar System. Another nail in the coffin? a) Most of the extra-solar planets detected in the past decades have their gas giant planets in very, very close to their system's stars. So, is our solar system just a whacko oddball? Or are they, all 104 or so of them, the oddballs? Now we have collisional mixing proposed for Mercury and the Earth, albeit small scale (one part in 10,000), but for Venus it may be one part in 750. At an earlier stage of solar system evolution, were there immense episodes of material transfer that churned the solar system (yet to form) into an incalculateable mixture? If this were so, or even if the early system was merely heavily mixed by eccentric planetesimals, it would blow the neatness of our theoretical considerations of equilibrium condensation and the other ordered notions we have concerning our origins into a cocked hat. I love the smell of a paradigm shift in the morning... Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Hadeeda Craters
Hi, Kevin, There are various transcriptions from the Arabic, including Hadid and Um-Hadid. It os often listed as one of the Wabar craters: Um-Hadid 0.01 km. Mentioned in CoM 1985: ...found in region of the Wabar crater. Silica glass and weathered fragments of iron meteorites (largest 1kg) found. Coordinates give in CoM: 21°30'N, 50°40'E approximately. See F. El-Baz and A. El Goresy, Meteoritics, vol.6, p.265, 1971. ARN says: Um-Hadid21'41'42' N., 50'35'48' E. Rub'al Khali, Saudi Arabia Found Stony-iron. Mesosiderite (MES). Oxidized fragments up to 1kg in weight were found associated with a crater 10 metres in diameter 15.4kg collected . And so forth. It's not well-documented. Try Googling Um-Hadid. Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Kevin Forbes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2006 9:14 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Hadeeda Craters Hello list, Anyone have any more info on this crater complex. There are only three mentions on google. http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1section=0article=79071d=12m=3y=2006 (snip) He told the audience that it offered numerous possibilities for future research. He said that parts of Saudi Arabia had been much wetter in early times and there was a thriving Savannah where now there was sand. The lakes and water tables that remain should be studied in order to reconstruct the history of the climate and then project it forward to enable us to understand how this area will develop in the future. The expedition visited the Hadeeda Craters - site of a famous meteor impact - in the southwestern Al-Rub Al-Khali. Professor Matter said that samples of the meteorite were being sold on the Internet for considerable sums to collectors. Drawing on his experience with meteor fragments in Oman where he set up a program to recover fragments from the desert, he said that the program had recovered meteorite fragments from the moon and even one from Mars. Collectors though, he said, had robbed the desert of its heritage simply for money and not for scientific research. The Al-Rub Al-Khali showed indications of considerable groundwater water resources, said Professor Muhammad Sultan of Western Michigan University. We have to do our homework and to establish its whereabouts and how much we can take out of it so that we can set up sustainable development of this area. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are on the right track. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Early Mercury Impact Showered Earth CORRECTION
Listees, The Giant Impact Theory may be improvable in the strictest sense... Doh! I meant UNPROVABLE, of course! This is what happens when you write for The List only two hours after having a large decayed canine tooth pulled, while the brain is still swimming in a pool of lidocaine... Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Early Mercury Impact Showered Earth
and Jupiter tug rather strongly on this tilt, trying to straighten it out (and indeed this tilt may have been greater in the past). Without the Moon to tug on the Earth's axis and keep us reasonably precessing in a narrow range of shallow axial inclinations, the many perturbations on the Earth would push the cycle of axial precession through a wild ride on a short leash, moving Greenland and Siberia to the sub-solar point and putting Brazil in the position of Antarctica (relative to the Sun). It would be climatic chaos. Yet, Venus maintains the most circular, non-eccentric orbit in the solar system, only 0.006, and seems to continue this delicate balance of some kind of complex resonance with the Earth on a long-term basis. It's hard to imagine major life-changing immense impacts would leave no greater trace. Of course, we have to define how major major is. These early impacts (Moon-forming or Mercury crust- stripping) are low-velocity or grazing encounters with planet sized bodies, as big as Mars or bigger. The range of eccentricities and inclinations in the Asteroid Belt requires the gravitational stirring of a body at least as big as Mars passing through the Belt repeatedly. Uranus was hit hard enough to lay it right over on its side. All these events are major. They leave marks. The impact of an asteroid as big as Vesta or even Ceres on a planet like ours doesn't qualify as major from this standpoint. That impact wouldn't strip crust or form a big satellite or alter a solar orbit in the least. All it would do is boil the oceans instantly, vaporize the top few kilometers of crust, creating a 3500 degree rock vapor atmosphere, and melt the rest of the crust down to its base at the mantle. Nothing major. It interesting to note that such an incident would convert the Earth into a very convincing twin of Venus in one day flat. We would have, in a very short time, a brand-new basalt crust that was all the same age everywhere on the planet (check), a 100-bar CO2 atmosphere from the breakdown of the oceanic carbonates (check) with an equilibrium temperature of about 350 degrees C. (check), a cloud-deck with the same photochemistry as Venus (check), totally suppressed tectonics (all the plates would have been fused completely into one when the crust melted -- check), and so forth. Venus, despite all the landers, mappers, probes, and effort expended on it, remains an on-going quarrel. We thought more data would explain things; it just gets worse. Consensus about how Venus came to be what it is, what forces evolved it, and how they work today, is not in sight. It could be merely because Venus is just that different, but is annoying that no one can agree on the crustal mechanics after all that radar mapping, that we can't explain the landforms, that there are major atmospheric constituents we can't identify, that we can't unravel even the noble gas abundances, and so on. In view of all these difficulties in explaining Venus, wouldn't it be funny if it was just a case of a perfectly ordinary terrestrial planet that took just such a hit from a big asteroid as described above. That would certainly explain it very economically. Nasty way for a world to die, though. Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Rob McCafferty [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2006 4:49 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Early Mercury Impact Showered Earth Definitely a thought provoking article. There are one or two things which have nagged me about Mercury and I see no reason why this article cannot point in the direction of solving them. We think that Mercury was created from a larger parent body that was involved in a catastrophic collision a large proto-planet collided with a giant asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, in the early years of the solar system. Mercury is an unusually dense planet, which suggests that it contains far more metal than would be expected for a planet of its size, Now I know I'm not the first to suggest this, ideed, I got the idea from a professor I studied under. Could Mercury be an ex-moon of Venus? A large object hitting Venus creating it in much the same way as we predict the moon formed? I've seen a graph of (ln)Spin Angular Momentum vs (ln) mass of the planets and they all fit on the line bar the Earth, Venus and Mercury. However, Earth/moon combined does fit the line, as does Mercury/Venus combined. Is this a coincidence? That the moon is drifting out from the earth due to tidal effects and will one day be lost...The Venus/Mercury mass ratio has greater parity than Earth/moon. Could it not be that the same process took place there and Venus simply lost mercury long ago? I have never once heard this suggested in the popular press and they say some pretty far out stuff. Is this a theory which is generally considered nonsense and if so, why
[meteorite-list] New HiRISE Images Released
Hi, Although I'm sure Ron Ballke will be posting aboutthese, I just want to say that the new full images just released from the HiRISE camera on MRO are just incredible: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/gallery/calibration/index.html The amount of detail is staggering. And they'reprobably only a shadow of the detail we'll see when the orbit is lowered... The color perspective view at the top of the list of imageson this webpage: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/gallery/calibration/images/Release_01_3d_1x_overview3.jpg has more of the feel of "being there" than any spacecraft image I've ever seen. Take a look; these are remarkable pictures. Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Early Mercury Impact Showered Earth
Hi, Larry, Rob, List Well, I left it out because of its short shelf life! No sooner was it put forward, than we discovered that 2003 EL61 has two satellites in what seem to be circular, co-planar orbits, which makes impact origin pretty unlikely and then, within a week or two (before or after?), two extra satellites of Pluto with orbits in the plane of Charon. I feel sorry for whoever rushed forward with that suggestion only to be cut down in the prime of life, so to speak. A theory ought to have the shelf life of say, a Twinkie, or at the very least, a Cheeto. Just plain bad luck; it was a perfectly logical and reasonable suggestion. It's just that we don't have a universe as logical and reasonable as our theories some days. Not to get drug into another long weirdness, but one of the interesting flaws of all our theories of the origin of the solar system is that they should explain the origin of big satellite systems just as easily as they describe the origin of big planetary systems, only they don't. Whoops! In fact, the how do satellite systems form? debate is like its own little sideshow, and is a much less settled area of the theory generally. Similarly, we all believe the Titus-Bode Law is not a law at all, just a misleading coincidence, and yet, if you configure it as a power law and jigger the coefficient, presto! you have a satellite law. You can construct Titus-Bode Laws for the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus satellite systems, all with different coefficients for each planet, but identical in form, only you have to leave out the small random satellites. As originally expressed, Titus-Bode is just a power law with a coefficient of 2.0. It fits the Solar System much better with a coefficient of 1.80 to 1.82. Satellite systems require smaller coefficients still. No explanation as to why that should be. Maybe there is something hiding under the Titus-Bode regularity that will become blindingly obvious once we figure out everything else. Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Larry Lebofsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Rob McCafferty [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 9:21 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Early Mercury Impact Showered Earth Hi Sterling: You left out the most recent of the impact theories: how do we get so many Trans Neptunian Objects with satellites? Large impacts! Larry __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Metal Tektite's?
Hi, Kevin, A tektite is glass. True, a special glass, with special characteristics, but it is by definition, a glass. The word tektite means molten. They are glasses because they were some kind of rock which was completely melted and then cooled too rapidly to form crystals again (which is why their origin is a concealed mystery and a quarrel). Certainly, tektites contain metals and the chemical compounds of metals, but if by metal tektite you mean something similiar to the way an iron meteorite is a metal meteorite, the answer would be no. Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: kevin decker To: Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2006 12:01 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Metal Tektite's? Hello,Does anyone here beleive that there might be Metal Tektite's?..Thank's..Kevin W.Decker. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Anomolous Aluminum Object's..
Hi, Kevin, They're molten blobs. I assume they're aluminum from the title of your post. Tektites either show high velocity aerodynamic sculpture or are layered. These are just blobs. Not knowing the circumstances of their finding doesn't help but blobs of melted aluminum could result from any number of human activities. IF they fell from the sky, then my guess would be that somewhere there's a plane engine in trouble. It's worth noting that Nininger got a COPPER meteorite from the man who witnessed its fall, which fall was in all particulars like a meteorite fall. It turned out, upon chemical analysis, to be the completely melted remains of an aircraft engine bearing (always check your oil before you take off). Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: kevin decker To: Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 8:16 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Anomolous Aluminum Object's.. Hello,can anybody help me figure out what these are?..They remind me of some tektites..I found these in Florida..Thank's..Kevin W.Decker. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Self-Destructing Comet to Flash Close By(Schwassmann-Wachmann 3)
Hi, Darren, List, I don't know where to begin... They let this guy direct air traffic? I can see those headlines now: VW-sized Block of Ice Falls in Atlantic; Earth Destroyed! (Film at eleven.) What does the Exo- in Exopolitical Institute stand for? Exo- means out, outside of, beyond. Out, as in out-of-my-mind? Or Out, as in far out? Or Out, as in money out of your pocket if you buy my idiotic book? Seriously now, at the risk of offending the Higher Intelligences, both the ones that zip about in UFO's drawing those pretty crop compositions, and the ones that read this List, let me point out that there is a tiny, tiny grain of reality in the ravings of Monsieur Julien. Very tiny. Mais Oui! We have no idea why Schwassmann- Wachmann 3 broke up. Fluffy, dirty snowball bonked by even a tiny impactor? Overspun itself until it flew apart (Giaccobini-Zinner did that)? A burst of out-gassing so violent it blew up its weak structure? All these explanations assume very weak structure, and the continued breakup of the initial fragments seems to confirm that, but... can we assume that the comet was composed ENTIRELY of very weakly consolidated ices? If it was that weak and poorly cohered, how do we explain the fact that it existed at all? Presumably, it has lasted for a long time in the inner system. Hmmm. You don't suppose it could have been heterogeneous in composition, do you? You may recall that I posted how evidence that would force a revision of our simple-minded definition of a comet and an asteroid has been piling up (back on April 5, 2006) from recent missions: Closer looks at individual asteroids show us a very wide range of compositional differences. What if Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 contained a dark, rocky silicate core or component about which the weak ices had assembled or aggregated for essential support until it was recently disrupted? A DARK rocky component not easily detected now that it has been stripped of those showy volatiles but still quite intact? So, you see, just because M. Julien is a cretin doesn't mean he's wrong, unfortunately. Nobody's perfect. We will know for sure if we hear cries from ALL the Atlantic Coasts: Surf's Up! About 200 meters... Knarly, dude. Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Darren Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 9:26 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Self-Destructing Comet to Flash Close By(Schwassmann-Wachmann 3) On Mon, 24 Apr 2006 09:44:31 -0700 (PDT), you wrote: Fortunately no threat is posed to Earth since, even at its closest, the nearest of the pieces will be twenty times more distant than the Moon. Ha! Shows what they know! Part ot the comet is projected to hit the Earth on May 25th, and it is all Dubbyah's fault! See: http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=63973 and http://www.exopoliticsinstitute.org/Eric-Julien-25-MAY-2006-En.htm __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Fw: [meteorite-list] Anomolous Aluminum Object's..
Thank You sterling!!..That may be just what they are!..Zephyrhills is due west of Cape Canaveral..Been there..used to watch the liftoff's from our house..and the highest hill in town!..And indeed if that's what they are?..they would be a cool souvenir! Will this reply go to the list?..Kevin w.Decker. --- From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: kevin decker Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Anomolous Aluminum Object's.. Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:58:33 -0500 Hi, Kevin, Now that you tell me that they are composed of aluminum particles and since I looked up Zephyrhills on a map, I suggest that they are from the solid rocket boosters for the Shuttle. From NASA's web site: The propellant mixture in each SRB motor consists of an ammonium perchlorate (oxidizer, 69.6 percent by weight), aluminum (fuel, 16 percent), iron oxide (a catalyst, 0.4 percent), a polymer (a binder that holds the mixture together, 12.04 percent), and an epoxy curing agent (1.96 percent). The propellant is an 11-point star- shaped perforation in the forward motor segment and a double- truncated- cone perforation in each of the aft segments and aft closure. This configuration provides high thrust at ignition and then reduces the thrust by approximately a third 50 seconds after lift-off to prevent overstressing the vehicle during maximum dynamic pressure. And of course they would be melted and have traveled at a high speed and all the rest of it. If that's what they are, they make a pretty neat souvenir, even if they aren't tektites! Sterling --- __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Anomolous Aluminum Object's..
Hi, Kevin, Now that you tell me that they are composed of aluminum particles and since I looked up Zephyrhills on a map, I suggest that they are from the solid rocket boosters for the Shuttle. From NASA's web site: The propellant mixture in each SRB motor consists of an ammonium perchlorate (oxidizer, 69.6 percent by weight), aluminum (fuel, 16 percent), iron oxide (a catalyst, 0.4 percent), a polymer (a binder that holds the mixture together, 12.04 percent), and an epoxy curing agent (1.96 percent). The propellant is an 11-point star- shaped perforation in the forward motor segment and a double- truncated- cone perforation in each of the aft segments and aft closure. This configuration provides high thrust at ignition and then reduces the thrust by approximately a third 50 seconds after lift-off to prevent overstressing the vehicle during maximum dynamic pressure. And of course they would be melted and have traveled at a high speed and all the rest of it. If that's what they are, they make a pretty neat souvenir, even if they aren't tektites! Sterling --- - Original Message - From: kevin decker To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 8:22 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Anomolous Aluminum Object's.. Thank You Sterling, I don't know the circumstances of they're origin..I do know I found them in about a 3 foot suare area in Zephyrhills FL..I do know what they look like under the Microscope,They are made up of tiny irregular shaped pieces of aluminum?..that look like river cobbles.except microscopic.rounded cobbles..not sharp,or broken..know what I mean?..then on the outside are molten looking.they get odder,there is what appear's to be a crust?..along with tiny regmaglypt's..lipover's..blob's of molten sand?..very interesting under the microscope!..beat's me..rocket part's from an exploded rocket?..all I know is, they do appear to have come through the atmosphere at a high rate of speed. Kevin W. Decker.P.S..I just received a tektite from Thailand that look's just like the largest one's outline..and just about the same size..person called it a spatula tektite. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five)
Hi, List, With several stories being posted about the new research on lunar return samples showing that there was indeed a Late Heavy Bombardment with a sharp peak after a quiet period, instead of the Final Flurry of an ongoing bombardment, I realized that the Planet V hypothesis put forward several years ago to account for the LHB also ties in with several other new developments. The Asteroid Belt should be a zone of relatively similar objects in relatively circular, non-inclined orbits; that's what ALL the Solar System formation theories would predict, despite the differing formation mechanisms they propose. But, of course the real Asteroid Belt isn't like that. There are a wide variety of compositions, like iron asteroids (that could never have formed that far out), dry asteroids, wet asteroids, carbonaceous asteroids, differentiated asteroids, non-differentiated asteroids, asteroids with diamonds, asteroids that smell like bubble gum... You name it. In short, every oddball composition we know from meteorites. The SRI published a computer simulation earlier this year (about which Ron Baalke posted to The List) that suggests the Asteroid Zone is full of objects that formed elsewhere in the Solar System (like iron asteroids) because they were ALL deflected there from other parts of the Solar System. It is silent on what did the deflecting, but the simulations seems to show that's the only way they could get there And, there are asteroid families with very distinctive eccentric and inclined orbits, grouped together. The delta-V required to drive asteroids into those orbits requires repeated close encounters with a body larger than Mars (about 1 to 4 Mars masses). This observation is decades old, but no one has ever suggested, again, what did the deflecting, or when. Below is a news story about Chambers and Lissauer's Planet V (for Five) hypothesis, which they offer as an explanation for the Late Lunar Bombardment, but it seems to me that the hypothesis may have legs, as they say, and that the other unexplained conditions described above offer some confirmatory implications. And, if you're looking for other unexplained facts to tuck into the envelope, there's the anomalous slow, backward rotation of Venus (a day longer than its year), for which repeated close encounters with a large body has been suggested as a cause. Planet V? And last, there's the mantle-stripping Big Splat on Mercury. We've always assumed that it took place as early as our own Moon-forming Big Impact, but it could have happened at 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago instead, the final outcome of Planet V's rogue career. Guess we have to wait for that Mercury Sample Return Mission to find out... Here's the only Chambers paper on the hypothesis that I could get to, for free anyway: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2002/pdf/1093.pdf There's an Australian paper that tries to duplicate the results of Chambers and Lissauer, but can't. http://eo.ucar.edu/staff/dward/sao/dward617paper.pdf Its flaw is that it makes Planet V a puny little thing, about 5 to 8 times too small to do the job. But then, so does Chambers, because he wants Planet V to end up crashing into the Sun, a silly notion whose attractions I am blind to. I like the Big Splat. But I understand his problem. If you're going to stick another planet in the Solar System to account for all these things, why, you have to get rid of it somehow since it doesn't seem to be around any more! Mercury makes a perfectly good hit man. Sterling K. Webb -- http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/fifth_planet_020318.html Long-Destroyed Fifth Planet May Have Caused Lunar Cataclysm, Researchers Say By Leonard David, Senior Space Writer posted: 03:00 pm ET, 18 March 2002 HOUSTON, TEXAS -- Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things. Space scientists John Chambers and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center hypothesize that along with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars -- the terrestrial, rocky planets -- there was a fifth terrestrial world, likely just outside of Mars's orbit and before the inner asteroid belt. Moreover, Planet V was a troublemaker. The computer modeling findings of Chambers and Lissauer were presented during the 33rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held here March 11-15, and sponsored by NASA and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. It is commonly believed that during the formative years of our solar system, between 3.8 billion and 4 billion years ago, the Moon and Earth took a pounding from space debris. However, there is an on-going debate as to whether or not the bruising impacts tailed off 3.8 billion year ago or if there was a sudden increase - a spike
Re: [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five)
of nickel in the iron in mesosiderites yields a cooling rate of one degree every 500,000 years -- very slow.) Maybe it hit Planet V-for-Five. Maybe it WAS Planet V-for-Five or a good chunk of it. Or a satellite of Planet V-for-Five dragged along for the ride when its orbit became unstable. Or... I look at my little chunks of mesosiderite with new respect. I sidle up to them at the bar and buy them a drink in the hope that they will tell me their life story... Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Darren Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 9:14 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five) On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 20:05:52 -0500, you wrote... And, if you're looking for other unexplained facts to tuck into the envelope, there's the anomalous slow, backward rotation of Venus (a day longer than its year), for which repeated close encounters with a large body has been suggested as a cause. Planet V? Cough-Velikovsky-cough. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five)
Hi, All, Well, sure, if as the author states, we believe that such a big object never existed in the outer solar system, then you have to find something else. That's because he belongs to the High Mass Density Nebula School and not the Low Mass Density Nebula School. If you have high mass, the planets accrete in a big hurry from small planetesimals and it's all over quick. If you have low mass, accretion takes longer and it needs lots of big planetesimals. If you have high mass, though, the nebular gas is there while the planets are accreting, and the drag of trying to shove a blanking Jupiter (and all the planets) through a thick cloud makes so much drag that they spiral rapidly into the Sun and vanish. So, something (who knows what?) has to blow off the entire mass of the nebula in the nick of time and save the planets and push them back out again. The biggest difficulty is that this kind of accretion would produce planets that are all very much alike, since they accrete from small planetesimals that are all remarkably similiar because a high mass nebula is well mixed. It would produce planets far more alike than the planets we've actually got, which look more and more different the more we learn about them. You can see that High Mass theories have problems. It was not a popular theory at all until... TaDa! We discover all these 100+ extrasolar planets and, OMG! There are Jupiters and Super-Jupiters orbiting closer to their Suns than Mercury... Suddenly, the High Mass Density Nebula Theories are the chic new thing and everybody wants one! Of course, this kind of solar system generates the biggest best signal for detection by the method being used and a solar system like ours wouldn't register at all. And sure enough, if you plot the discoveries versus their distances you can see that these are highly biased samples. There are more discoveries at greater distances instead of less, which means a great volume of stars is likely to contain some even more extreme systems than a small volume. They represent less than 4% of the selected likely targets. I think they're the oddballs, and the other 96+% all have solar systems that are normal, whatever that is. At least they don't have 10-Jupiter mass planets orbiting only 20-30 million kilometers off the star! Anyway, you got any idea just how close Jupiter would have to be to Uranus to roll it over? Like eighteen-wheelers playing Chicken on dirt road, raised to 100th power... Like all the rest of the High Mass Density Nebula theory, it requires some very close calls and lots of lucky coincidences. As Bohr said to Pauli, We all agree that your theory is crazy. Now we're arguing about whether or not it's crazy enough to be true! No big objects in the outer Solar System!? Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Darren Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 9:29 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five) On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 19:49:55 -0500, you wrote: Even Jupiter has a three-degree tilt. Ya know its gonna take a good whack upside the planet to tilt Jupiter! Uranus is tilted over on its side; it takes an impact with an Earth mass object to deliver that amount of change in momentum. Or maybe not: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12498416/ Early gravitational pull tilted the big planets New theory departs from earlier idea that tilts were caused by impacts Updated: 3:59 p.m. ET April 26, 2006 WASHINGTON - An early gravitational dance made the giant planets tilt the way they do - which is different from the way Earth and the other smaller planets tilt, an astronomer reported on Wednesday. The shift probably happened billions of years ago when the bigger planets in our solar system were closer together than they are now, and the gravity of each one exerted a pull on the others, said Adrian Brunini of the Facultad de Ciencias Astronomicas y Geofisicas in Buenos Aires. This neutral gravitational interaction caused Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to have tilted axes that were determined as they moved through the solar system to take their current positions far from the sun, Brunini said in a telephone interview. This is a departure from an earlier theory that holds that the massive planets' tilts - or obliquities, as astronomers call them - were caused by collisions with Earth-sized space rocks during the early period of the solar system. This model has some problems that were not clear how to solve, Brunini said. For example, we believe that such a big object never existed in the outer solar system. In research published in the current edition of the journal Nature, Brunini used numerical models to show that the outer planets' obliquities could have been created by gravitational interactions. All the planets in our solar system have tilted
Re: [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five)
Hi, David, List, Not unexpectedly, I agree that HED-Mesosiderites are all out of one connected origin. This is not a new notion. Digging around, I found this quote from the early 70's. It is a reasonable working hypothesis that there is a close genetic relationship among the eucrites, howardites and mesosiderites. (John S. Lewis) The use of oxygen isotope ratio slopes is pretty definite, but listening to the occasional oxygen isotope spat that happens on this List, it seems to me that people may take them for more definite than they are. With all the other elements, we are dealing with isotopes present only in solid phases -- they ain't going anywhere. But in early system formation times, oxygen is present both in the solid phases of various minerals AND in possible gaseous phases which can (and often do) undergo exchanges with solid material. So, it's always possible that the oxygen now present in one rock had two sources, each from differing times and conditions. There's no way to distinguish dual sources. We have to regard O-ratios as reliable but tricky, like somebody who's usually completely honest but once in a while will tell you a totally unbelievable whopper with a perfectly straight face. Maybe the E chondrites are one of those tall tales. They're certainly not Earthly in any other way, and very depleted in volatiles, while the Earth is volatile-rich, some of which are suspected of having been added to the mix from a separate source. (I guess I have my metaphors mixed; perhaps the E chondrites are honest and the Earth is fibbing.) Maybe that's it. It's funny the way the pieces of one argument tie in to another. If the solar nebula was very sharply zoned because there was little mixing, why, the O-isotope data would be like a street address or a file location on a hard drive. If you belong to the super high mass density school (more mixed), the O-isotope data would be more like random gossip. The fact that O-isotopes are as reliable as they are puts a constraint on how much or little mixing there could have been. Planet V is just one hypothesis to fit the (now) pretty well proven fact of the Late Bombardment. When the evidence for the LHB showed up in the 1970's, there were a fair number of people convinced that it must be a mistake or a wrong number. But since it seems to have really happened, the only explanation is that something big got loose and went on a collision rampage. Whether it was this particular object (Planet V) or some other object with a different origin and characteristics remains to be seen. I was just impressed with how many other things fit with Chambers' Planet V notion. Chambers' field is celestial mechanics; he just searched for a solar orbit in the area that seemed stable (no obvious resonances or other problems) but became unstable after 600 million years, at the time we need something to come loose. He found one. I suspect it's up to others to fill in its physical characteristics. The Dawn mission is wonderful, and its ion engines are wonderful, blah, blah, but... so slow. I have to wait until 2011 to see Ceres? I'm a mental primitive; I want to LOOK at it. I had to Google deep to find out how sharp a resolution the camera on the Dawn mission is: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=DAWNex=1 The camera field of view is 5.5 x 5.5 degrees with a resolution of 9.3 m/pixel (175 pixels per mile) at a distance of 100 km. (Nine meters per pixel is about what the MRO test images got from high orbit, remarkably detailed.) There are two identical cameras aboard. They will be busy. I calculate the surface area of Ceres as 1,153,700 square miles! That's 35 GigaPixels. (The land area of the US is 3,537,438 square miles counting Alaska and Hawaii; Ceres is about a third of a US.) Vesta is only about 880,000 square miles! (27 GigaPixels) I said about because it's a tri-axial oblate spheroid. (Anybody got the area formula for that?) It'll be worth waiting for! Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: David Weir [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 12:28 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five) Sterling K. Webb wrote: Maybe it hit Planet V-for-Five. Maybe it WAS Planet V-for-Five or a good chunk of it. Or a satellite of Planet V-for-Five dragged along for the ride when its orbit became unstable. Or... I look at my little chunks of mesosiderite with new respect. I sidle up to them at the bar and buy them a drink in the hope that they will tell me their life story... Sterling, It may be just another one of those O-isotope coincidences, like the fact that E chondrites have O-isotopic values that are indistinguishable from those of the Earth, or that brachinites have values that are identical to the HEDs
Re: [meteorite-list] Re: Planet V (for Five, and not for Velikovsky)
Hi, Just a thank you to Bob Verrish and Rob McCafferty for their kind words. I'm afraid it's just case of That boy has too much time on his hands... But as long as something on The List sends me off to travel the Google Highway (or my own bookshelves) for extended periods, I figure I might as well drag some of the more interesting road-kill back home. For those who know when they see another my posts that they're in for more lost planets, rogue comets, plutonian cosmogony, supernova dust drifts, deranged interplanetary devices, or something else just as bad, and know it's not their cup of tea, you'd figure they would know by now to just skip over it or use that magic DEL key. I expect they do. Me, I'm a masochist who reads everything on The List and keeps a year's worth of it in my Inbox (25,000 strong) until bundling it up in 100 Meg chunks of text and stuffing it in the odd corner of my drive. I never throw anything away. (You should see my bookshelves...) At the risk of sounding like an old Eastern Bloc movie, Long Live The List! Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Robert Verish [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite-list Meteoritecentral meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 7:03 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Re: Planet V (for Five, and not for Velikovsky) Hello List, Just wanted to agree with what Rob said and to add that this List would sorely miss the thought-provoking posts by Sterling K. Webb, were he to decide to go to a more receptive discusson group to share his insights.Can't always read and respond in time to posts to this List (and I really wanted to make that joke about the connection between Planet V and Planet Velikovsky;-). Just wanted to thank Sterling for all the research time and effort that he puts into each of his posts. Would rather speak-up now, than wish I had said something sooner. Bob V. Original Message -- [meteorite-list] Planet V (for Five) Rob McCafferty Thu Apr 27 17:12:08 EDT 2006 Hello list For those people recently who were harping on about the apparent disintegration of this list, this is an example of the sort of gem which I find make it all worth while. I like a lot of what is in this post and wish I had the celestial mechanics ability (and time too) to work on it (With a healthy dollop of simulation programming thrown in too) I will restrict myself to one thought to raise regarding this topic and this is; Did all trace of this planet disappear? Does anyone have any idea where NWA3133 may fit into the picture? Rob McCafferty __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Re: possible impact crater -- Nicaragua, Chad, Algeria
Hi, Stefan, List I think you got a crater there! The most impressive view is to set your altitude around 30 or 40 miles up, orient yourself to the NE of the crater, looking to the SW, then tilt the view until your eye level is at about 4 miles up, and zoom in slightly. Wow! That is a classic crater. That view alone is convincing... almost. It needs to be seriously investigated. Google Earth's view can be deceptive. I always trace the rim and cavity of what appears to be a crater and read off the altitudes to see it actually has a crater's geometric shape. Parts of the Nicaraguan crater's rim are half a kilometer or more above the floor. Jason Utas' candidate in Chad is an example of the deceptiveness of visual features. Knowing the shape of a crater, we interpret the dark areas in the floor of what looks like a crater as depressed and the bright features as central uplift and rim, but the dark features are actually as high or higher than the bright ones. When you tilt the view you see that the whole feature is elevated, like a squashed mountain. Oddly, it seems to be set in a square embayment. Very strange. It doesn't look entirely volcanic but it doesn't look much like a crater, either. Kevin Forbes' Algerian feature is essentially flat and consists of concentric rings of contrasting materials. Its appearance reminds me a lot of the much larger Richat Dome in Mauritania, whose crater or not status has been argued over for a long time. Currently, we don't think the Richat is a crater, but a domed, layered structure sliced off flat to reveal its layers. His less probable structure looks more like a crater in the tilted view, but it is too battered to tell much. The Sahara is not kind, even to rocks... Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Stefan Brandes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite-list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2006 1:21 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] meteorite-list] possible impact crater Hi list, has anybody heard about an impact crater in Nicaragua at coordinates : 13°21' N / 85° 57' W It´s about 12km in diameter and the town of Las Praderas lies directly in the center. It´s very good to see in Google Earth. As far as I know it´s definitely no volcano. Any ideas? Thanks Stefan __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] RE: Doing the rounds
Martin, List,
Martin wrote:
...recently I read in two independent articles that in mediaeval
times people would have thought and church taught, that the
Earth would be a flat disk, cause a round world would have
been inconsistent with the bible. What an incredible rubbish!!
(that prejudice about the disk firstly appeared in 17th century).
Well, Martin, I hate to tell you, but it is NOT TRUE that it is a
modern prejudice that the Church taught that the world was flat.
The Early Father Lactantius wrote extensively against the rotundity
of the Earth from 302 AD to 323 AD and promoted a flat Earth
with a box lid of the heavens over it, the Tabernacle Earth. By
the mid-Fourth century, the vast majority if the patristic fathers
were opposed to a spherical Earth, a long list: Cyril of Jerusalem,
Diodorus of Tarsus, Philoponus, St. Jerome... But the chief
promulgator of Flat-Earthism was Cosmas.
Cosmas Indicopleustes ('India-voyager') of Alexandria was a
Greek sailor in the early 6th century who traveled to Ethiopia,
India and Sri Lanka. He then became a monk and before 550 AD
wrote a strange book, copiously illustrated. There can be few books
which have attracted more derision than the Christian Topography
of Cosmas Indicopleustes. It advances the idea that the world is flat,
and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid.
The author cites passages of scripture (inaccurately) to support his
thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical earth by
stigmatizing it as 'pagan.' Cosmas was basically a poorly-educated
crank (internet-style) but through him Christianity was solidified into
supporting the idea of the flat-earth.
In defense, let it be said that Christians and pagans did not as
such hold different views about the shape of the world. It was
a subject on which there was no certainty of knowledge for the
common man of the ancient world. It was cutting edge, like
Relativity, and as little understood. And by the fourth century,
knowledge was decaying away at a rapid rate, without any more
help from Christians than from any of a host of causes.
Cosmas' book is not without some value. There was trade
between the Roman Empire and India, but Cosmas was no doubt
the only writer who had actually made the journey. He traveled
the Red Sea coast, and as far as Taprobane (Ceylon, modern
Sri Lanka), and he describes some of what he saw, and even
drew pictures of strange animals in his autograph manuscript.
Away from his whacky theory, Cosmas is both interesting and
reliable. It was this content that made the work was immensely
popular in the Dark Ages (much as Mandeville's Travels were
in the Middle Ages), but it carried his cosmology along with it.
You can read the complete text of Christian Topography at:
http://www.ccel.org/p/pearse/morefathers/cosmas_01_book1.htm
if you want laugh and groan.
Isidore of Seville (600-635 AD), very erudite, discusses a variety
of theories without really deciding which is right, but most writers
of the seventh century stuck with a Flat-Earth model the Babylonians
had proven erroneous 3000 years before!
Starting with the ninth century, Greek writing, preserved in Ireland,
begins to seep slowly back into the Christian West. Bacon and
Aquinas may have known about the Ptolemaic theory but they did
not write about it. But it is not until 1256 AD that the first short
and sketchy account of the Ptolemaic system appears in a
European language, just a few pages. And the full exposition of
a geocentric spherical Earth would wait until early- to mid-fifteenth
century for full publication.
The importance of celestial navigation in Europe's expansion toward
gobbling up the planet (Hey! Somebody had to do it!) was the chief
impetus for pushing for greater accuracy and understanding that would
lead us to Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and all the rest
of that story...
Sterling K. Webb
-
- Original Message -
From: Martin Altmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com; 'Rob McCafferty'
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 7:26 PM
Subject: AW: [meteorite-list] RE: Doing the rounds
In fact without the church, we really would live in a dark age nowadays.
Smth which is always forgotten, as the discipline of History of Science is
mainly philology, a branch which since decades isn't directly en vogue.
For a period of about 800 years the church was the only institution
collecting knowledge, doing science and educating students.
And nowadays we wouldn't for sure live in such a technically and
scientifically developed (socially I'm not so sure) world,
if there wasn't done the enormous transfer of knowledge by the clerics in
mediaeval times of the classical sciences, which the Islamic scientist
rescued and enlarged. Already before 1000 A.D. the first Arabian texts (btw.
Astronomical treaties) were translated to Latin by monks
Re: [meteorite-list] Giant Asteroid Fragment Makes Impact
Hi, The rational for survivor fragments of an impactor is that they are from the far back side of the impactor. The transformation of the impactor's mass from a solid to a plasma proceeds from the front or impacting surface. A shock wave from this explosive vaporization preceeds the actual transformation, traveling at the impact speed of the body plus the rate of expansion of the vaporization. If this shock wave speed exceeds the speed of sound in the impacting body, the shock wave will fracture, pulverize and even vaporize (if it's fast enough) the body of the impactor ahead of it. What helps a fragment survive a large impact? Well, it helps if the impact velocity is really slow, slow for an asteroid, that is. A body that reaches near the Earth just faster the Earth's escape velocity will reach the ground at about 11,500 m/sec. That's as slow as you can get. If you make the impactor have a low internal speed of sound, it will fracture more rapidly. It also helps if you make the impactor elongated instead of spherical, so that the far back tip has a chance of being blown off. In other words, you can jigger the models to make it happen. But when you do, you immediately run into huge problems that nobody likes. When you slow the impactor down to these low impact velocities, below 15,000 m/sec, little vaporization occurs and no fireball is created. Worse, little shock melting of the target material occurs. But his lump was found 700 meters down in the magma! Sounds there was plenty of melting going on... There's a problem. But Morokwong is a buried crater, not visible on the surface. It is in fact only visualized by magnetic and gravitational anomalies. It will need a lot more drilling to establish the thickness of the magma layer the fragment was in. But there is a lot of melt there; that's how it's been dated to 145+/-1 million years by U/Pb ratios. The models say the transient crater is deep, but it would shallow up dramatically from rebound and ends up as an extremely shallow crater for its size. If there was little shock melting, is it possible that rebound melting occured? Or the release of local vulcanism? I don't know if we know enough about this crater to be sure. You get slow internal speed of sound from low density and poor consolidation. I don't know the density of the fragment that was found but they mention the lack of nickel-iron metal, so low density seems possible. But if you have both low density and a slow impact velocity, it takes a really big impactor to make a crater the size mentioned for Morokwong (one press release says 70 km.; one says 100 km.). I found one study of core samples that says the crater has to be less tham 80 km. This would still require an 11,000 to 12,000 meter object at very low densities and impact speed. Normal densities and velocities for the impactor would make only a 4000 meter impactor necessary. A fast impacting iron (ruled out by the fragment) would only have to be 2000 meters. I think the shock wave in a large slow impact in a really big impactor might blow off some fragments. The chunk flies up (luckily) on an almost-vertical trajectory and drops back into the crater a few minutes later and is enveloped in the rising magma. Plop. The problem with models is that we can only test their limits, not their accuracy. When you hear that such and such a crater was made a certain kind, size and speed of impactor, that only means that it fits inside the envelope of the models, modified by what few clues we can find on the ground, like extensive shocking that suggests a high velocity... It doesn't mean we have a measurement of the impactor. If only we had a 100 km crater that was only a million years old (or less)! We could learn a lot about big impacts from that! However, all the relevitely new ones are little and all the big ones are old. The biggest newish ones are: Zhamanshin, Kazakhstan Location: 48°24'N, 60°58'E Diameter: 13.500 km Age: 900,000 +/- 100,000 years, Bosumtwi, Ghana Location: 6°32'N, 1°25'W Diameter: 10.500 km Age: 1.30 +/- 0.2 million years. Both are poorly investigated. Maybe there's something to be learned there? There's definitely a lot to be learned from this fragment! And lastly, there's no doubt what would be the most expensive L chondrite of all time, though. Morokwong. Be a while before we see it on eBay... Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 12:26 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] Giant Asteroid Fragment Makes Impact Public Relations Office Cardiff University Cardiff, U.K. May 11, 2006 Giant asteroid fragment makes impact A first-ever discovery of a fragment from a giant meteorite which crashed to Earth millions of years ago could cause a re-think about asteroid collisions with our planet
Re: [meteorite-list] Giant Asteroid Fragment Makes Impact
Hi, Two things I don't believe in: coincidences and leprechauns. OK, I could be wrong about the coincidence, but I'm right about the leprechauns, aren't I? I wrote: But Morokwong is a buried crater, not visible on the surface. It is in fact only visualized by magnetic and gravitational anomalies. A summary of the geology can be found at: http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/images/morokweng.htm An analysis of the meteoritic content of the impact melt can be found at: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2000/pdf/1595.pdf Tentatively, the impactor has been identified as an L chondrite: www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/impact2000/pdf/3048.pdf Hopefully, a comparison of the found fragment with the impact melt composition anomalies will rule it in or out. If it WAS a coincidence, I'm still on the beam with the leprechauns, right? Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Meteorite Mailing List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 5:23 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Giant Asteroid Fragment Makes Impact Another possibility is the meteorite fragment they found was from another fall, and not from the impactor that created the crater. Bear in mind a lot can happen geologically in 144 million years since the crater was formed, not to mention erosion effects. The depth the crater is at today is probably not the depth it was when it was created. Ron Baalke __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Meteorite Market 101
Hi, Assuming that hippocracy, like the word democracy, has Greek roots, the actual meaning would be: a state ruled by horses, from hippos, Greek for horse. For a detailed picture of what such a land could be like, consult Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I think that at the very least we could count on lots and lots of nice public parks in the form of meadows, a boom in hay boutique ristorantes replacing Starbucks, and crowds of rich gambling Palaminoes and Arabians at human foot races! It could be worse. Sterling K. Webb -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: to prevent a hippocracy God knows we need to prevent thatthem hippo's are ruthless. G __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Statistics for falls
Hi, Tracy, List, It all depends on what you mean by annual meteorite fall rates? Turning to the record and outlining the number of observed, recovered, analyzed, recorded, named, museumed, and collected space rocks yields a number at the end of a long, long selection process. On the other hand, annual meteorite fall rate could mean how many rocks enter the earth's atmosphere and survive to land on the ground somewhere whether anybody finds them or not. These are two vastly different figures. The most widely quoted figure is from Canada's MORP (Meteor Observation and Recovery Program, I think it stands for. I've been calling it MORP for so long I forget. They say about 25,000 objects per year yielding 100 gram to 10,000 gram meteorites on the ground. The first person to dare to estimate the figure was Ninninger, of course. He screwed his courage up enough to suggest 500 such meteorites per year, but privately wrote that he though it could be ten times bigger (5000 per year). If you like digging in the MetList archives, you'll find a fat posting on Nov. 9, 2000, (and a lot of replies) where I outlined a different method of estimating the fall rate and came up with a figure of 50,000 to 80,000 per year, based on how many meteorites hit cars. The method is the same as is used in nuclear physics to calculate collisional cross sections. No reason why it shouldn't work for space rocks too! (Hey! A particle is a particle is a particle.) Oddly enough, with Worden and Park Forest, there have now been more car hits per decade than even my estimate of a fall rate of 50,000 to 80,000 would have predicted, corresponding to a rate more like 100,000 to 120,000 per year. (Credit where credit is due: Rob Matson was the only one who thought my tripling of the MORP rate was too low and suggested 100,000+ per year.) As to whether it's increasing, why, we'd have to agree on what the fall rate is now, and what it once was and how to measure it and so forth before assessing whether it was changing... It does seem that things are a little busy right now, but, is it a blip? What's he get if he wins the bet? A lifetime supply of those little pink umbrellas? The right to pick the channel on the TV over the bar for a month? A steak dinner? A meteorite magnet to re-direct all the falls over Hawaii to your house? A meteorite crash helmet to wear on the way to the bar? Sterling K. Webb --- tracy latimer wrote: Aloha, all! My husband is in the middle of what amounts to a 'bar bet'. He is trying to find out annual meteorite fall rates, and whether, in recent years, there has been an increase. I have been searching for fall rates online without much success; I even attempted to contact the meteorobs newsgroup, but my mail to them was bounced back. Does anyone have a link to a resource that might have this information? Duck-n-cover, Tracy Latimer __ __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Statistics for falls
Hi, Mark, The method was simply this. First, imagine that we could find and count every meteorite that falls on the entire planet. We just wait a year and then count them BUT, we really can't do that, so... We scrape off a square mile and cover it with white paper and wait 10,000 years, then count the meteorites, divide by 10,000 and multiply by the number of square miles on the planet, and... Hmmm, I can't wait 10,000 years (I'm really busy). We need a bigger target so we don't have to wait so long. Wait a minute. The target doesn't have to be all in one piece. If we had 1,000 patches placed at random all over the planet, each being one square mile, we'd only have to wait 10 years to have good results! In fact, the results would be better than one big patch, because all local variations would be canceled out by putting many target patches all over the place. So, how about 50,000,000 or so target patches, each about 10 square meters, scattered all over the Unites States, and to make it more truly random, we'd move the target patches around all the time, every day, putting them in one spot for a few hours, then repositioning them someplace miles away for a few hours, then moving them back again... You guessed it, the target patches are OUR CARS (and trucks). They total up to a target patch of about... (scribble,scribble) 500 square miles or so. BIG target. And the best thing is: we really pay attention to our cars. We love'em. If a big honkin' rock breaks a window, dents the trunk, or punctures the roof, WE NOTICE. The lady in New Zealand said about their house crashing meteorite: If it had fallen in the garden it would probably have been added to the pile of rocks I am taking to the dump. Nobody would have known about it. Ruining the family SUV is even more noticeable than hitting the house. What if it had just bounced off the roof into the garden? I think using cars as the target does more to solve the reporting problem than any other method. (However, I sometimes wonder how often a meteorite bonks a car, the owner comes out in the morning, finds the big dent, sees the rock lying in the gutter, and mutters, Damn kids!) Anyway, you can find out how many cars are registered in the US in each year, multiply by the average cross section of a car, get the total target size, count the number of meteorite hits on cars per year for the last 70 years or so, and calculate back to approximate a fall rate for the whole planet. Statistically, it is a sensitive enough method that the drop in the number of US cars in the 1940's (World War II and gas rationing) shows up as a low in meteorite car hits. Personally, I welcome any meteorites that have their eye on my 1996 Ford station wagon. They're welcome to it. Lunaites, especially... Sterling -- minador wrote: Sterling Wrote: where I outlined a different method of estimating the fall rate and came up with a figure of 50,000 to 80,000 per year, based on how many meteorites hit cars. The method is the same as is used in nuclear physics to calculate collisional cross sections. Wow, that's great to hear. Have there been any papers written on this subject? What is the convention wisdom regarding meteorite supply? Are they being hunted out, or are hunter's just beginning to scratch the surface (of the earth)? Private replies are always welcome. As I said before, I don't want to take away from Tracy's post... Over out, Mark B. Vail, AZ __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Original Meteorite Kills(Fill in Blank) StoryAppears in WWW
Hi, All, The people who publish WWW are like all the other checkout tabloid publishers, cynical Brits who rightly believe that there is no limit to how rich you can become by underestimating the intelligence of the average American. The really strange people are the ones who READ the Weekly World News! Sterling Webb - Paul H wrote: While waiting in the local cehckup line, I noticed that this week's Weekly World News (WWW) has one of the latest versions of the Falling Meteorite kills (fill in the blank) story. The headline reads, Meteorite Flattens Pope. In the tradition of the Weekly World News, it is quite a shaggy dog story complete with fake photographs. The people, who publish the WWW must be really strange people. Yours, Paul __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Test Delete
Erase me __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] From the Admin - Please Read
Hi, Well, that explains the passage of 20-odd hours without a single post to the List! Plain text, like gravity, isn't just a good idea; it's the law, apparently. Sterling K. Webb - [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Good Evening Everyone; Due to recent List processing changes, emails that contain suspicious header information, attachments, and HTML will probably not make it through the List filters. I have implemented these changes in a pro-active effort against email virus transmission through the List. Unfortunately this may affect some emails that don't contain virus code, but that only look suspicious. If you think you have good posts that are not going through (by good I mean text-formatted and no attached files) please send me an off-list email and I'll look into it. Thank you! Art Meteorite Central __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] LETTER FROM EBAY
Hi, Mark, List, EBay is the market itself, not the cop in the market. A major story in the St. Louis area this weekend is the arrest of the owner of a commercial cleaning service who's been (alleged to be) robbing his customers blind and disposing of the stolen goods, not through a fence, but by selling his loot on eBay! Sterling Webb - mark ford wrote: it's pretty evident that ebay, are not capable of policing their auctions, Mark F. __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Antarctic Craters Reveal Strike
Hi, Everybody, Assuming that this first report is solid, is supported by followup research, everybody agrees on everything, yada, yada, this has potentially revolutionary, or at least upsetting, implications. Note the DATE of these huge impacts. Yes, boys and girls, it's almost perfect match for the best estimated date of the Australasian tektite event. So it would seem that decades of vain searching for a same-date impact crater in Thailand, Cambodia, drilling in the Tonle Sap, et cetera, was a big waste of time. Or are we going to insist that an invisible undiscovered crater in S.E. Asia is responsible for the Australasian tektite event when we have a 200 mile crater in a field of craters in Antarctica at the right date? And right next door, too. Let's say we accept the obvious conclusion that such a huge impact event in Antarctica at the same time as the Australasian tektite event cannot be a coincidence, and move the Antarctic craters up to number one contender for the cause of the Australasian tektite event. What does that do to the decades of theorizing, modeling, aerodynamic studies, and generally self-reinforcing thought that explains the variations in the tektites in the Australasian tektite strewn field (from Muong Nuong to Australites) on the basis of their distance from a supposed S.E. Asian impact when the impact is at the other end of the 10,000 mile long strewn field? Shoots it all to hell, is what it does. Even worse, every theorist with a theory license agrees that the source material for the formation of tektites is the surface rock of the Earth at the point of impact. That's SURFACE rock, NOT sub-surface rock, the Moldavites for example being explained by the composition of surface sand layers, which gave them the properties that set them apart from other tektites. OK, what's the surface rock of the Antarctic ICE sheet? Well, it's ice; there isn't any surface rock. It's ICE. How do you make a tektite out of ice? Beats me. The only source of rock is... the impactor itself. This, in turn, makes things a hundred times worse, because everybody agrees that tektites cannot be formed from any extraterrestial material that we know of: wrong elemental composition, wrong isotopic composition, and so forth. In fact, the further one moseys down the logic trail from the obvious and hard-to-escape acceptance of this immense crater field as the source of the Australasian tektite strewn field, the worse it gets. It strongly suggests that almost everything we think we know about tektites is wrong. Oh, no, how could that be? And us so smart and all... Sterling K. Webb - Of course, the first question is: how did they determine this date? What's the +/- of the date? Is it the same for all the craters? More details! - Ron Baalke wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3580230.stm Antarctic craters reveal strike BBC News August 19, 2004 Scientists have mapped enormous impact craters hidden under the Antarctic ice sheet using satellite technology. The craters may have either come from an asteroid between 5 and 11km across that broke up in the atmosphere, a swarm of comets or comet fragments. The space impacts created multiple craters over an area of 2,092km (1300 miles) by 3,862km (2,400 miles). The scientists told a conference this week that the impacts occurred roughly 780,000 years ago during an ice age. When the impacts hit, they would have melted through the ice and through the crust below. Professor Frans van der Hoeven, from Delft University in the Netherlands, told the International Geographical Union Congress in Glasgow that the biggest single strike seared a hole in the ice sheet roughly 322km (200 miles) by 322km. Impact melt This would have melted about 1% of the ice sheet, raising water levels worldwide by 60cm (2ft). The research suggests that an asteroid the size of the one blamed for killing off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago could have struck Earth relatively recently. Early humans would have been living in Africa and other parts of the Old World at the time of the strikes. But the impacts would have occurred during an ice age, so even tidal waves would have been weakened by the stabilising effect of icebergs on the ocean. The craters were resolved using satellite data to map gravity anomalies under the ice sheet. __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Could A Meteorite or Comet Cause All The Fires of1871?
of the ordinary. But so are the fires of 1871. Nothing like them has happened before or since, no matter how many dry summers there have been. Early attempts to start firestorms using only 2000 to 3000 incendiary devices dropped simultaneously failed. It takes 8000 (usually) or more. Interestingly enough, early nuclear weapons dropped on cities were not enough to get a really good firestorm going. So you can see how hard it is to start one. Peshtigo was overshadowed by the Great Chicago Fire (which happened at the same time) even though more people were killed at little Peshtigo than at Chicago. Careful examination of the reports indicates clearly that both fires were firestorms. In Chicago, a solid wall of fire advanced upwind in the face of a 40 mph wind (forced oxygenation and radiative acceleration), buildings blocks from any visible flames burst into flame instantaneously (radiative ignition), and ingots of iron stored on the banks of the Chicago river downtown melted and ran into the river (requires temperatures in excess of 2700 degrees F). These are all definitive of a firestorm. You can forget the one-cow theory. You can forget the 10,000-arsonists theory. In Peshtigo, the first event those who were awake agreed on was a blinding aerial flash, a thunderous detonation, hundreds or thousands of sudden little fires springing up everywhere, and the slow inrush of that terrible wind that turned their little town into a furnace in a time frame too brief for most of the inhabitants to escape. There are (but not universally) similar reports from everywhere these fires occurred. October 8 is the date of the now-weak Draconid meteor shower (or was in the 1870's). The source of the Draconids is Comet Giaccobi-Zinner. This comet was one of the first to be observed by a passing spacecraft. It's shape is a pancake whose equatorial diameter is five times its polar diameter. It is rotationally disrupted and material at the equator of the comet is virtually weightless. This disruption (which has to have been sudden and not progressive) has to have occurred very recently since the comet is dissipating rapidly and would be gone already if the disruption had happened very long ago. The radiant in Draconis is always above the horizon if you're far enough north. The terminus of the longest grazing path for Draconids (which would be the orbit of the heaviest fragments with the highest velocities) lies at 45 degrees north latitude (Peshtigo, Chicago, Michigan). A multitude of clusters of comet fragments air-bursting would produce a simultaneous barrage of Tunguska-like events with sufficient thermal output to produce numerous ignitions at ground zero. The date, 1871, is before the invention and deployment of either seismographs or barographs, so no evidence of these air-bursts would have been obtained as they were in the case of Tunguska. The case for the fires of 1871 has to be evaluated on the basis of the evidence. That's my explanation of the 1871 fires, scientifically feasible, I think, and boy! do I hate it when another crackpot comes along with an inferior crackpot theory, particularly when he stole his theory from a crazy dead Congressman! It makes all us crackpots look bad! On the other hand, isn't a story like Citizen Steals From Congressman! a little like the classic Man Bites Dog!? Sterling K. Webb - Ron Baalke wrote: http://www.cadillacnews.com/articles/2004/08/23/news/news02.txt Could a meteorite or comet cause all the fires of 1871? By Dale Killingbeck Cadillac News (Michigan) August 23, 2004 __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Could A Meteorite or Comet Cause All The Fires of1871?
Hi, Paul, The phrase all the fires comes from the newspaper, not me. My comments address only the Peshtigo fire, those small towns near Peshtigo, and the Chicago fire. Of course, there is a natural background rate of forest and grass fires after a long dry summer, and some of the October 8th fires had been burning earlier and there were fires afterward, too. But, I'll stand by the word simultaneous. The Wisconsin fires (nine towns over four counties, including Peshtigo) all started at the same time as nearly as can be determined. The time of the Peshtigo fire (9:30 pm) and the start of the Great Chicago Fire (9:25 pm) are for all practical historical purposes simultaneous, even though they are separated by hundreds of miles. Quite a coincidence! Hey, if you like coincidences, try this one. The Wisconsin fires are all oriented on a linear track running north and south and pointing at the radiant point of the Draconid shower. Well, OK, within 10 degrees. Still, it's a pretty good coincidence. The Michigan fires were regarded as complicating the picture (because there were so many small fires already burning) as early as 1872. See History of the Great Conflagration, by Sheahan and Upson, Chicago, 1872. However, it is difficult to explain the outbreak of intense and major new fires all over the state of Michigan, all starting at 9:30 to 10:00 pm, if each was the independent result of the random flare-up of an existing fire, and the absence of any new fires after October 8th. There were also fires in Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, both Dakotas, and in Manitoba and Alberta, Canada. I hold no brief for them (or the Michigan fires). Some, none, or all may have been triggered by air-bursts. I have not been able to uncover any definitive signs of firestorms (very high temperatures, de-oxygenated zones, etc.) in any account of the fires other in than Chicago and Wisconsin. That could be accounted for by the absence of concentrated fuel stocks or by the absence of thermal air-bursts or by their being natural fires, take your pick. It's mostly a case of attitude. If you accept the likelihood of an airburst causing the Chicago and Peshtigo fires, then the other fires are suspicious but indeterminate. If you go with the one-cow theory, well, fires are fires and they start all the time, so what? Both are reasonable but depend on where your starting point lies. Sterling - Paul H wrote: In Could A Meteorite or Comet Cause All The Fires of 1871? http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/meteorite-list/2004-August/143245.html Sterling K. Webb wrote: These strange fires were not restricted to the IL-WI-MI triangle centered around the southern end of Lake Michigan. Because of the slowness of communication in 1871, it was not immediately recognized that the fires of October 8, 1871 were scattered over parts of seven states and Canada and may have caused as many as 10,000 deaths. I would be interested to know where the claim that the fire actually started in seven states and Canada simultaneously. From what I seen written in well- researched books on the 1871 fire, i.e. Michigan On Fire by Betty Sodders in 1997, the fact of the matter is that fires outside IL-WI-MI area were occurring and started well before October 8 and had been occurring all Fall because of the hot and dry weather that had created a drought that was devastating in its own right. If a person looks at the historical record, he or she would find that it is an absolute misrepresentation of it in stating that these fires all started simultaneously with the October 8 fire. The so-called instantaneous / simultaneous nature of the fire, from what I have seen, is pure fiction created by shoddy research and wishful thinking on the part of advocates of the comet impact theory, who seem to be rather ill-informed of the actual chronology of forest fires in 1871. For example, a person can read The Fire that Destroyed Holland, Michigan at: http://www.geo.msu.edu/geo333/holland%20fire/hollandfire1.html In terms of the so-called simultaneous nature of the 1871 fire, the web page noted: There had already been a threat of danger earlier in the week. Fires kept smoldering and burned barns and houses, but the danger seemed to be far from the city. Then on Sunday, October 9, there were reports that a threatening forest fire was coming. and The community at the time was populated with 2400 residents and for many days previous, these residents had battled and beaten many small fires that had erupted throughout the town. It is quite clear that fires were starting within the area of the 1871 fire days, even weeks, before October 8. The fire of 1871 simply didn't magically appear on October 8, 1871 out of nowhere but was preceded by numerous smaller fires days, even weeks, before it occurred. Even more interesting comments
[meteorite-list] Extrasolar Planets -- SuperEarths
Hi, All, The extrasolar planet news was the discovery of smaller and smaller planets than the Jupiter and Saturn sized worlds that have been discovered up until now. Now both ESO and Marcy Co. have discovered planets that are Uranus/Neptune sized, 10 to 20 Earth masses, with ESO claiming the record at 14 Earths. So, what would a Super-Earth be like? If you start with the same recipe mix of ingredients and just made a bigger batch of planet, is it just the same, only more so? Nope, more of the same is not the same. If the Earth were bigger, the volume of water would increase faster than the increase in surface area, so the oceans would be deeper. Because of the deeper oceans and the greater gravity, the pressures at the bottoms of those oceans would be much higher. Continents and their mountains would be much lower, because the temperatures in the crust would increase faster with depth, until the fluid point would be reached in the crust instead of the mantle like it is on our Earth. Mountains can only pile up until the pressures under them are about 3000 to 3500 atmospheres, and that zone would be reached at shallower and shallower depths on a bigger Earth. The solid crust of a larger Earth would be much thinner, heat transfer to the surface much faster, volcanism much livelier, plate tectonics much zippier. Imagine an Earth exactly twice the diameter of our Earth: 16,000 miles across. It would have four times the surface, eight times the volume, and 12 times the mass (compressibility squishes). It's surface gravity would be 3 times greater. The escape velocity from the surface would 2.45 times greater. Because it would have 12 times the water but only four times the surface, the average ocean depth would be about 9000 meters! The pressure at the depths of these oceans would be about 3000 atmospheres. The highest mountains possible would be about 4000 meters (calculating from the median diameter), so if you were the greatest mountain climber on the SuperEarth, standing on the top of SuperEarth's highest mountain, you would have 5000 meters of water above you! Whoops! No continents. The SuperEarth is a WaterWorld. On our Earth, the crust is about 30 kilometers thick, but the lithosphere (rocks that stay stiff and not slushy and slippy) is about 75 kilometers, so the Earth's lithosphere contains all the crust and the top part of the mantle. The crust of the SuperEarth would be about 90 km thick, but the lithosphere would only be about 30 kilometers thick. This means that it would be very difficult to sink pieces of crust (subduction) and equally difficult to bring deep basalt magmas to the surface. On the other hand, the SuperEarth's silicate crust would be recylced very rapidly with lots of local vulcanism and hotspots and have a very similar composition everywhere. The only weathering that would be possible would be chemical, because all the volitiles are released into the oceans rather than the atmosphere. The only question we can't answer is how hot or cold a SuperEarth would be, since that depends on the distunce to its Sun. Too far away and the oceans turn to ice, even Ice III which sinks. Too close and the oceans boil away, creating a SuperVenus. Even that is problematical, since it's hard to strip the atmosphere and oceans away from a planet that has an escape velocity of 27,400 meters per second! So a bigger Earth is not just a bigger Earth. Knowing that somebody will ask how big a bigger Earth has to be before there's no land at all, just oceans, the answer is: somewhere between 2-1/2 and 3 Earth masses is the point where the median ocean depths equal the height of the highest possible mountain. Glub, glub! Sterling K. Webb Footnote: David Brin has suggested that most Earth-like worlds are bigger than our Earth and are mostly Water Worlds, and that is why we never get visited by intelligent aliens, who are all really smart whales with no astronomy, no hands, and no spaceships... Paul H wrote: Extrasolar Planets Discovered Kathleen Burton Aug. 30, 2004 NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. Phone: 650/604-1731 or 604-9000 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] NOTE TO EDITORS AND NEWS DIRECTORS: News media representatives are invited to view live televised coverage and commentary of a major extra-solar discovery announcement on Tuesday, Aug. 31, at 10 a.m. PDT. The coverage will be broadcast live from NASA Headquarters in Washington on NASA Television and can be viewed in the lobby of the N-201 auditorium at NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley. Following the briefing, Dr. Jack Lissauer, a NASA Ames planetary scientist, will be available for interviews. NASA Television can be seen on AMC- 6, Transponder 9 located at 72 degrees west longitude
Re: [meteorite-list] Helt Township???
Hi, The Catalogue of Meteorites lists only three irons for Indiana: KOKOMO 1862 Find IVB Ataxite LA PORTE 1900 Find IIIAB PLYMOUTH 1893 Find IIIAB and nothing for VERMILLION Gee, anybody got any HANGMAN'S CROSSING? What a great name... Sterling Webb -- Dave Schultz wrote: Greetings. While checking out different web sites on Indiana meteorites, I came across the Indiana University, Indiana Geological Survey website, and they state that an Iron meteorite fell in Vermillion, Indiana around 1883-84, which would make that 13 Indiana meteorites. I have never heard of this meteorite and only thought that there was 12 meteorites that fell or where found in Indiana. Any other info would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. Dave __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[Fwd: [meteorite-list] Helt Township???]
Hi, Everybody, I'm forwarding this explanation for the Vermillion meteorite, from an authoritive source. It was a meteorite, sure enough, just didn't fall in Indiana! Obviously, someone must have drug a Canyon Diablo back to Indiana. Was it an intentional fraud? Or did the story just fuzz up over the years until an Arizona souvenir was believed to have fallen on the farm itself? Is this more a question for the folklorist than the meteoriticist? The LOUISVILLE (Kentucky) meteorite (Fall, January 31, 1977) was a car-bonker, the third reported US car-bonker, I believe. Sterling K. Webb -- Shaffer, Nelson R wrote: I saw your note on the meteorite list. The vermillion (Indiana) meteorite was shown to be a Canyon Diablo by Buchwald is his monumental Handbook of Iron Meteorites. I should modify our web site to reflect that. Hangman's Crossing is a find from near Seymour, Indiana. Most of that stone remains in the hands of the finder Charles Miller who lives near Seymour. His son-in-law is Phil Bonneau who is a geologist working in Indianapolis. We have a slice on display but can not part with any at this time. If you wish I will send a paper about the meteorite. We also were involved with the Louisville meteorite. Thank you for your interest. - Nelson R. Shaffer Head, Coal and Industrial Minerals Section Indiana Geological Survey 611 N. Walnut Grove Ave. Bloomington, IN 47405 Phone: 812-855-2687 Fax: 812-855-2862 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sterling K. Webb Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 10:41 PM To: Dave Schultz; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Helt Township??? Hi, The Catalogue of Meteorites lists only three irons for Indiana: KOKOMO 1862 Find IVB Ataxite LA PORTE 1900 Find IIIAB PLYMOUTH 1893 Find IIIAB and nothing for VERMILLION Gee, anybody got any HANGMAN'S CROSSING? What a great name... Sterling Webb -- Dave Schultz wrote: Greetings. While checking out different web sites on Indiana meteorites, I came across the Indiana University, Indiana Geological Survey website, and they state that an Iron meteorite fell in Vermillion, Indiana around 1883-84, which would make that 13 Indiana meteorites. I have never heard of this meteorite and only thought that there was 12 meteorites that fell or where found in Indiana. Any other info would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. Dave __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Massive Blast Rocks UK Homes
Hi, A morning meteor (7:30 a.m.) is likely to have a very high entry speed and hence be a good candidate for an airburst regardless of size. If you think of the Earth as a car driving its orbit like a NASCAR racer, the dawn terminator is the nose of the car, the noon point is the driver's side and midnight is the passenger side. The sunset terminator is the trunk latch, of course. If you think about what happens to those bugs you meet head-on, you can see why an early morning meteor is much more likely to splat into the atmosphere and pop! Sterling K. Webb --- David Freeman wrote: Dear Ron, List; Meth lab? Dave F. Ron Baalke wrote: http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/133/133432_riddle_as_massive_blast_rocks_homes.html Riddle as massive blast rocks homes Neal Keeling Mancester Online (United Kingdom) October 13, 2004 A MYSTERY explosion rocked Greater Manchester today. Police and the fire service received dozens of calls from the public about the blast which happened at 7.30am. But despite efforts by both services to locate the source nothing was found. Fire service spokesman Ian Bailey said: We had people calling from a wide area - Chorlton, Flixton, Farnworth, and Walkden - saying they had heard a huge explosion. But we have not responded to any incident which would explain the blast. Some of the control room officers at our headquarters in Pendlebury also heard it. A police spokesman said: We have not been able to find any explanation and there is no rubble or bricks anywhere. Measurements The British Geological Society is investigating.Though none of their earthquake signals were triggered, it said that it may have been too shallow to register on their measurements. Another possibility is that the blast could have comefrom old mine workings. There are disused shafts in the Walkden area and at Agecroft where a pit closed at the beginning of the 1990s. Lynn Hall, of Sherwood Drive, Pendlebury, said: At 7.25am this morning I was locking the door of our house and my husband Carl was waiting for me to come out. He said to me `Did you hear that loud bang?' He kept mentioning it because it was so loud. One caller to a radio station has claimed that she saw something falling from the sky. But fire brigade spokesman Paul Duggan said: If it had been a meteorite we could have expected to have found a crater - which we haven't, unless it is the middle of a golf course or a field. __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Which one came closest?
Hi, Great thread! Closest to me was BENLD fall, 1938, nine miles to the east of me. It is the first verified car-bonker meteorite. It crashed through the roof of a garage, through the roof of the car parked in the garage, through the back seat and the floor boards, and ended up in a small pit in the dirt floor underneath. This was enough to earn it permanent residency in the Field Museum in Chicago. I have always suspected there were more stones, but Benld is a former coal mining camp that was turned into small town when the mines closed. Its soil is clay and trailings mixed with an truly incredible volume of early 20th century machine junk, scrap iron, and slags. A searcher's nightmare. Leave your detector at home. Sterling K. Webb - [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello everyone, Since the List is very quiet tonight.. I was chatting with an ex-List member earlier today about the newest Colorado meteorite, probably an eucrite. And I noticed that the meteorite that fell (was found) closest to where I am from is also an eucrite: Bouvante. Do you know which meteorite came closest to your backyard? Anne M. Black www.IMPACTIKA.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] IMCA #2356, www.IMCA.cc __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Two Slow moving meteors over NE Pennsylvania
Hi, All, Any object falling to Earth from a decaying orbit from East to West would be in RETROGRADE orbit, which would be unusual for a man-made satellite. I don't actually know if there are any retrograde satellites (help, experts!) but it's hard to do, very expensive in deltaV, so I doubt it. A retrograde orbital re-entry would be faster, not slower, than normal. A natural object captured by the Earth's gravity is equally likely to end up in a retrograde or prograde orbit, even a partial one that brings it into the atmosphere to burn up, but it wouldn't be slow in either case. An interesting possibility is an Inner Solar System object in an eccentric orbit that extends out as far as the Earth. At the Earth, its (heliocentric) velocity would be significantly less than the Earth's (heliocentric) velocity and it could (if ahead of the Earth) be captured and enter the atmosphere at far less than the Earth's escape velocity. This is about the only possible explanation of a slow moving retrograde entry observation. Sterling K. Webb E. L. Jones wrote: Any de-orbit/decay expected tonight Sep 30, 2004 over Eastern North America? Perhaps there is a swarm in orbit-- both fireballs were very similar in look and trajectory. Interesting greenish color, low incandescant fireballs tonight at 8:21 and 8:27 Observed along Rt 209 in Carbon County Pennsylvania. They were slow moving, falling east to west. The first one glowed on two spots on the body itself after the fireball extinguished. This glow remained visible for almost as long as the fireball portion of flight. The observations were about 4-5 miles apart along the east west roadway. Didn't hear any sonic booms. (yeah ok ok I'll get around to a fireball report in time) I am announcing this now in the event that there is a stream and someone else gets to checkout their section of the sky. Regards, Elton __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Day From Hell May Have Killed Off Dinosaurs
Hi, Not to nitpick at the Reuters man, but... The killer asteroid theory was proposed by Luis W. Alvarez (and his son Walter) in 1980. The gravity data which identifies Chicxulub was gathered beginning in 1948. Despite a lot of Googling, I can't establish the date when two was added to two to produce four, but it was in the early-mid-eighties, before Luis Alvarez's death in 1988. For a really nice link to a Chicxulub page (Alan Hildebrand's) with great pictures, try: http://miac.uqac.ca/MIAC/chicxulub.htm Sterling K. Webb -- Ron Baalke wrote: http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNewsstoryID=610337 ...Despite opposition from some scientists, the idea that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid that slammed into Mexico's Yucatan peninsula has won general acceptance since it was first mooted in the early 1990s... __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Mike Farmer and his Bush B Gone sale..
Hi, Martin, That kind of talk is perfectly acceptable if you are running for national political office, like a senator or congressman, but we'd appreciate it if you'd tone it down a little for us. Sterling K. Webb - Martin Brody wrote: Enjoy smoking a turd in the welfare line next to your hero John Kerry. You got what you deserved scumbag. __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Suspected Sonic Boom Heard Over England
Hi, All, One of many sonic boom reports. Some things to bear in mind. National air forces always deny immediately that one of their planes are responsible. Notice that in this story that the RAF is investigating, but have already denied it was a military plane. What, then, are they investigating? They do so because pilots are not supposed to pop the sound barrier over the civilians and we all know pilots never do anything they're not supposed to, right? As was said in the story, There are regulations governing supersonic flight... And regulations are never broken! Some years ago, I spent a lot of time investigating a sonic boom in my region that was felt over an eighty mile area, a substantial event that broke some windows over a thirty mile wide area. Really big boom. Could well have been a meteor. After about a week of military denials, it turned out that it had been a test flight of a new plane with an enthusiastic test pilot from the plane's manufacturer. He hadn't reported violating flight regulations, of course, until the story wouldn't go away. As for civilian planes being incapable of causing sonic booms, that too is a myth. They are perfectly capable of doing so, but are not supposed to, an entirely different matter. In times past, all large planes were designed with the possible conversion to military use in mind. Many commercial planes in use today could easily go supersonic, but would the pilot and crew want to badly dent their careers by admitting that it had happened, even accidentally? (It's easier than you think...) An uncle of mine, a private corporate pilot, took delivery of a brand new Boeing 707 back when that plane was the very latest craft (1960). As it was to be a cargo carrier, it had no seating and no creature comforts. It was a bare stripped-down shell, all engines and fuel tanks. After having shaken down the ship flying from Seattle to New York, he refuelled and set out to fly from New York to Saudi Arabia non-stop, a long and tedious trip which he enlivened by travelling at a speed comfortable for the vehicle in this configuration. Almost all of his route was over ocean, except for crossing Italy, but then Italy is rather narrow and he thought it wouldn't really be a problem. He was quite surprised when what seemed to be the entire Italian air defense force was scrambled to intercept him as he passed south of Rome at 1120 mph. A lot of explaining to do. It seems they thought he might be a Russian bomber. A silly notion, as the Russians in 1960 didn't have any plane that large that could fly that fast. Then, there are the cases of the many sightings of a hypersonic experimental craft for more than a decade and whose existence is still thoroughly denied. But it's been seen, often over the North Atlantic, so many times and with such agreement in detail that you can go and buy a plastic model of this airplane that doesn't exist. A vehicle travelling at speeds of up to 5000 mph creates a sonic boom that carries for many hundreds of miles and whose extent and persistence is very hard to predict accurately. If only every sonic boom was a meteor about to deposit a fresh fall... But it ain't necessarily so. Sterling K. Webb - Ron Baalke wrote: http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnlinecategory=NewstBrand=edponlinetCategory=newsitemid=NOED08%20Nov%202004%2017%3A55%3A31%3A097 UFO boom - Unidentified Foreign Object EDWARD FOSS EDP24 (United Kingdom) November 8, 2004 A suspected sonic boom heard across north-east Norfolk today was not caused by a British aircraft, it was confirmed tonight. The loud bang, heard at least from Sheringham to Halvergate near Yarmouth, startled hundreds of people going about their daily business at around noon. But a Ministry of Defence spokesman said it was not a domestic fighter that caused the incident, although he was unable to confirm the source of the sonic boom. We believe there was a sonic boom, but it was not a British aircraft that caused it, said Lt Col Stuart Green. t was not one of ours. Whether the aircraft was European or American was not clear, but they would be the most likely suspects. But it would have been a military aircraft, as no civilian plane is capable of going fast enough to make a sonic boom. A spokesman for the UK Civil Aviation Authority said the now out of service Concorde was the only civilian craft that had ever been able to travel fast enough to create the phenomenon. North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb described how he had been sitting in his office in North Walsham when he heard an incredible boom. The building shook and like many people I was shocked. I thought 'has there been some sort of gas explosion?' Mr Lamb said he felt the disturbing incident begged questions that needed to be answered. He pledged to approach ministers for an explanation
Re: [meteorite-list] **OT** Denver help
Hi, Since the continents do not float on the oceans, the mark will not have moved. If the mark was one mile above sea level before the three inch rise, it would now be 5279 feet 9 inches above sea level, not 5280 feet 3 inches above sea level. The statistic that sea level has raised three inches is meaningless without a since. Since yesterday? Since last year? Since 1950? Since 1900? Since 1776? Since 1066? Since The Fall of Rome? What? Actually, I believe the touted three inch rise is for the twentieth century, or a phenomenal 0.75 millimeter per year. Since I live at 441 feet above sea level, that means that the Gulf of Mexico will be lapping gently at my front doorstep in only another 179,222 years and 5 months. Guess I'd better start packing. Living in Colorado won't help. At that rate, it will get to the marker on the Colorado Capitol steps in just 2,145,792 years! Keep a weather eye out! OK, seriously, as a news item, it's just another piece of classic Global Warming Hype Scare, like today's new report that ultimately the expansion of wind power will change the Earth's climate. Both are examples of ridiculous Politico-Pseudo-Science for media consumption. 1. The Earth IS CURRENTLY IN AN ICE AGE. Do you see ice anywhere on Earth? If your answer is Yes, then IT'S AN ICE AGE! 2. The current slightly milder climatic episode is called an interglacial, meaning that during this period the ice remains but does not advance. The longest interglacial on record in the last 100,000 years is 11,200 years. This current interglacial has persisted for 10,800 years. To quote Clint Eastwood, Do you feel lucky, punk? 3. Despite insane warnings that the climate is warmer now than it has ever been in recorded human history, the climatic peak of warmth occurred about 6,000 years ago when it was 10 degrees warmer than it is now. Far from being a disaster for mankind, this peak of warmth coincides with the beginning of civilization, the founding of the first cities, the birth of agriculture, the invention of writing, science, literature, and human culture generally. 4. The normal climate for this era (the last couple of hundred thousand years) are the conditions you find if you excavate the French Riviera at the 18,000 to 25,000 year old horizon: the permafrost was six to nine feet thick and 85% of the animal bones are reindeer, about like Barrow, Alaska today. Very few bikinis in evidence. 5. Evidence from ice cores and lake varves, et cetera, shows that the turn from interglacial mildness to normal ice age conditions can happen on a time scale of less than 1 year to maybe 50 years. No one knows what triggers the return of normal ice age climatic conditions. 6. Anyone who thinks that it's a good idea for humans to intervene on a planet-wide basis to cool the Earth's climate down as much as possible is an irresponsible idiot. Having now given offense as widely as possible and seeing no other sacred cows on the horizon, I'm going to go toss some more carbon-laden fuel into my personal CO2 generator and toast my feet by its waste heat while thumbing through my well-worn copy of the works of Milutin Milankovich. Keep warm! Sterling K. Webb -- Tom AKA James Knudson wrote: Hello List especially Denver members. They say there is a building in Denver that has a step that is exactly one mile high. I heard on the news that the ice cap is melting due to global warming and that sea level has raised three inches. I want to know if it is true, so if someone can see if that step is still one mile and not one mile and three inches, I would appreciate it. : ) Seriously, do you all think this is true, and if so, does it affect anything? Thanks, Tom peregrineflier IMCA 6168 http://www.frontiernet.net/~peregrineflier/Peregrineflier.htm __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] f instead of s - 1770's style
Hi, All, An Orthography thread on a Meteorite List: sort of the ultimate Off-Topic! But fascinating. Mark, if you are looking at originals, take a close look at those f's you've been seeing in the XVIIIth century press, you'll find that they are not quite regular f's. They have only half a crossbar. That is, a short crossbar is to be found only on the left-hand side of the upright and not on both sides as would be the case with an f. In English typography, the stretched s like a thin integral sign is found only in the Italic fonts where it originated. This letter form has the disadvantages of being harder to cast into type than most letters, of wearing out faster, of breaking more easily, of being harder to ink consistently, and of being less readable because it fills up both ascender and descender space. Printers never liked that letter. So, even by the early XVIIth century, it was replaced by the modified half-crossbar f, which is a durable letter form and can even be easily made by cutting the right-hand crossbar off some extra f's with a penknife! We look at the half-crossbar f and don't even notice this tiny change because we do not expect to have to distinguish between two different letters, but an XVIIIth century reader read this distinction as effortlessly as we tell the difference between a plain dot and a dot with a tail (period and comma). Some typecasters emphasized the difference by making the right-hand crossbar on the true f longer than the left-hand one. As for consistency, Doug, besides being the hobgoblin of small minds, everyone spelt and lettered as the spirit took them within the broad framework of the language. Shakespeare spelled his own name seven different ways (including Jaxs Pere). Jefferson is writing right at the beginning of 30 year long transition that eliminated the half-crossbar f for s in print, so he wobbles between the old style and the new style, and as always, he was ahead of the curve. On the other hand, I have seen handwritten documents as late as the 1840's that preserve the long s. Some folks just don't like to change. But English can do without a system in which the word selfless comes out looking a lot like felfleff! Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi again Martin (Bernard, Bernd, Mark and all others on this), and thanks again for all your last posts. That is a heck of an analysis. Let me complement it with a more humble one comparing how Handwriting got Typeset and why (IMHO) in the 1770's by English intellectuals residing in America. I'll take Englishman Thomas Jefferson, who changed nationality upon writing the document below. So by the 1780's Great Britain and the new US writers probably liked that style given the intellectual community established standards of typeset formality. I like this example as Jefferson has gotten a lot of flack for what I now understand were political comments never sustantiated anywhere firsthand in writing about the lying Yankee professors and Weston fall, so it is also insightful to understand his thought process on nature. He was considered a genious, by the way, IQ estimated at 172, and had quite a sense of humor right to his death on July 4, 1826. 1. Jefferson wrote a draft US declaration of independence in June 1776 using a semicursive style without any f-type (integral sign type) s. His penmanship isn't much different to that of today regarding this, inclusive he uses the script s and the print s apparently without distinction I see, however it is easier for his hand while writing. 2. Jefferson did not capitalize nouns in his writing, but when it was typeset, all nouns are capitalized. 3. Capital S in Separation typed as modern capital S in the printed version released by General Congress and read by Washington to the troops in New York on July 9, 1776. 4. The noun god was not capitalized by Jefferson. This appears in the phrase nature's god he wrote. In the print version, it was capitalized, as all other nouns. 5. Lower case s beginning should from Jefferson typed as f 6. The s used at the end of words in the typeset release was the modern s. 7. So it seem quite possible to me that a combination of German printing expertise and their use of the f, and in order to sidestep the argument of whether to capitalize Jefferson's god, i.e., nature's god, led to the German style typeset used, rather than a progressive one reflecting the way the progressive intellectual community wrote at the time... Thus the f even at this time is a typeset artifact, just as the loops that connect the ct at the end of words in the typeset version, not evident in Jefferson's handwriting. 8. The f-type Intergal sign s has even been implicated in the formation of the dollar sign $ pillar or pillars still in use today. 9. Not that this is more
Re: [meteorite-list] Question about oriented meteorites
Hi, Jason, and All, Half right. Way too light to be iron, but way too heavy to be stone (with densities generally below 3). But if you mix roughly equal volumes of iron (at 7-8) with stone (at 3 or so), you get an object in the 4.5 to 5.5 density range. Good examples are the Earth or the planet Mercury, or on a smaller scale, a stoney-iron meteorite! On the other hand, one should never accept a reporter's word on math or meteorites at face value. Sterling K. Webb --- Jason Utas wrote: Hello Rob and All, In Response to this: The object weighing 47.015 kg with a 4.75 specific gravity was fallen... ... it could still be another type of meteorite (meso or pallasite?) Rob [Matson] A mesosiderite or pallasite seems pretty improbable -- if the density of iron is 7.874g/cm^3, then either this meteorite has verrry little iron in it and is a stony or it's made of half iron and half air (or some other nearly weightless substance [yeah right]). The Kid __ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Mystery object in photo
Hi, Chris and everybody... Like you, I was horrified/disgusted at having to use JPEG's that were practically one gigantic artifact. I would love to have the RAW data, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it was gone by now. Usually, the conversion to an image format takes place when downloading the RAW data from camera memory to a computer, mediated by the capture software. If it's not still in the camera (or its memory card), it's gone. The creator of the first difference image later posted another diff image which shows the surface of the inlet between the pier and the camera and the brightening is general over the entire inlet and brightest on a central line from the camera to the flash. Here's the URL: http://images.isja.org/images/strange_diff_pryde_03.png I don't think it's significant whether the streak enters the frame or starts within it. The other characteristic you mention, the slight widening to the left, could be considered another indication of a dissipating trail from the object and hence proof it's real. But the image is not really good enough for that. I judged a slight arc by enlarging the image to various degrees and putting a flexible lucite scale on the face of my flat-screen! But the optics of digital cameras are rife with spherical abberations of perspective, and this is a Cannon G3, a cheap point and shoot. The camera (for those who asked) was set on automatic; the photographer did not stand by the camera and make exposures. The frames are 15 seconds apart. All digital images contain a set of embedded data about the camera state and setting, time, and so forth. These can be faked but it's not that easy. As for whether the image is a fake, the best argument against it is this: why would you fake an image about which no one can agree? Why make it look like it hit a lamp post when you know the post won't show any damage? Why not just photoshop in a BRIGHT streak, like everyone expects to see? It's easy; I could take this picture and produce a lovely little fake in about an hour, complete with fake embedded data. But it would ultimately be detectable. Now, why a low density object? Actually, it's easy to transport extra-terrestial material with cosmic velocities gently to the surface of the Earth without damage. Every year, tens of thousands of tons of cosmic particles drift down through the atmosphere, taking weeks to days to do so, and plop onto the planet. But they're tiny: dust. Equally, big nasty chunks try it, and they are fried for trying. At some point, the dual axes of these graphs cross and the entering survivors live there. The low angle of entry, complained about by many, is in fact one of the most salient characteristics of a body that can survive to reach the surface of the Earth. A grazing path slows the buildup of entry forces. Low density? As the density decreases, the ratio of surface area to mass increases, until at some point you have an object that can dissipate the heat of its entry sufficiently to be non-luminous, like the mystery object. The suicidal path for a small meteorite is to bore straight into the atmosphere from the zenith at high velocity. Hell, it's only 30,000 meters; I can make it in less than a second! Poof! Additionally, a flattened shape would probably aid survival as well, but I'm a physicist, so all my objects are generalized to spheres. :-) As for bugs... I didn't know it when I started reading all those pages of argument, but there is a (pseudo) controversy about photographing insects; just go Google flying rods. If you photograph insects at slow shutter speeds, they appear as strange alien forms with helical fins, and yes, there are some idiots out there peddling bug videos as movies of tiny alien spacecraft invisible to the naked eye, blah, blah... But the streak in the mystery photo (exposure 1/20 second), proposed to be a time-blurred bug, does not look anything like what an actual long exposure image of a flying insect looks like. Check out the flying rods and marvel at the gullibility of the poor humans. I still don't know what this is. Sterling K. Webb Chris Peterson wrote: Hi Sterling- While I appreciate your efforts at approaching this in a scholarly way, and agree completely that there is an awful lot of wasted bandwidth on the discussion list endorsed by APOD, your view an mine are quite different, and point to the difficulties of interpreting very subtle effect in images- especially JPEG images. In particular, I disagree with the following physical observations: -That there is a correlated brightness increase in the inlet. I see only a variation caused by the surface chop changing the sky reflection. There are various areas of each image that shift slightly in brightness, sometimes more, sometimes less. -Your assessment of the difference image. The difference image I made shows the streak
Re: [meteorite-list] Asteroid Gets Initial Elevated Risk Rating, But Impact Unlikely (Asteroid 2004 MN4)
Hi, The best chance of refining the orbit of 2004 MN4 lies in a search for sky photos of the times and places in the past when this object should have been visible. In the case of the last object with a chance of hitting the Earth in the future (in 2018), the successful search for what are called pre-discovery images from years previous to its official discovery refined the orbit enough to eliminate that future collision probability. If such images could be found for 2004 MN4's previous approaches, the further back the better, the orbit could be determined with much greater precision than observations over the next six months. The object is certainly large enough (and hence bright enough) to have shown up in past sky plates. The chief difficulty in finding such images is that the object's orbit lies mostly inside the Earth's orbit, to Sunward, where observation is difficult if not impossible for most of the year. The search would have to be for the periods each year after April 13, when the object is exterior to the Earth's orbit. You'll recall there was a very, very close approach just earlier this week by a very small object (16 feet) which also approached from the Sunward (blind) side. Often forgot in these discussions is the fact that while the probability of an impact is often low or negligible at any one crossing of the Earth's orbit, in the long run, the chance of eventually impacting with a low-inclination Earth-crossing object is virtually 100%. It takes the Earth approximately 432 seconds for its entire diameter to pass a specific point on its orbital path, creating 200 chances to be impacted at a specific point every day. In the case of an object with exactly the same inclination as the Earth which crossed the Earth's orbit on the same day at the same point every year, a collision would be inevitable at some point in that 73,050 year cycle (365.25 times 200). And objects with very low inclinations will always be perturbed, repeatedly, into and out of a matching inclination with the Earth's orbit. In other words, sooner or later, they're gonna get ya! While we are busily cataloging the easy-to-observe exterior objects, very little is being done to discover the hard-to-observe Sunward objects because the strategies are hard (i.e., expensive) to implement, like photographing the western horizon just before dawn to catch objects that have just crossed the Earth's orbit. Yet Aten class Earth crossers --- whose numbers are not well known nor even well-estimated --- are vastly more dangerous than the better cataloged Apollos and Amors, for just that reason. Sterling K. Webb - Herbert Raab wrote: Charles Viau wrote: Are our orbital calculating capabilities really good enough to project out 25 years on such a small object? Yes and no. The calculating capabilities are certainly not the limiting factor, but rather the limited amount of observations (35) on a limited number of nights (5), each with small (but a-priori unknown) error limits the accuarcy. A number of possible orbits for such an asteroid can be found that agrees with the available observations. On some of these orbits, the asteroid will have a close encounter with Earth in 2029, on others (on 1 in 300 or so) the object will collide with our home planet. There is no way to tell which of these orbits is the true path along which the asteroid moves, unless more data is collected. When additional observations are added (the object is observable until May 2005), the number of orbits compatible with the available observations will be narrowed, the uncertainty in the predicted position for 2029 will decrease, and in all likelyhood, the impact solutions will be removed. Happy holiday to all! Herbert Raab __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Asteroid 2004 MN4 Update - December 24, 2004
Hi, I note with interest that the odds of a 2029 collision were reported to have been calculated as 300 to 1 on December 23, 2004, and that one day later they are calculated as 60 to 1, a five-fold improvement. Now, if by next week, they're improved to 12 to 1, I propose that this asteroid be named Clinteastwood. Referring of course to his famous line in Dirty Harry to the bad guy holding the shotgun who can't decide whether Harry has fired six shots, or only five. Clint says, You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky? Well, punk, do you? The 98.4% chance of no impact only addresses the probability of impact indicated by the data we have in hand now. It does not mean there is a better than 98% chance that new data... will rule out any possibility of impact, as suggested below. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Low accuracy data do not predict high accuracy data. In the hunch-wise department, the fact that newer data has resulted in a tightening up of the cluster of future orbital paths around the bundle of collision paths is not particularly encouraging. What you have with uncertain orbital data is an ellipsoid surrounding a point on the Earth's orbit which contains all the possible predictable paths of 2004 MN4 on April 13, 2018, and inside that ellipsoid is a circle that represents the position of the Earth. When the odds of collision go up, it means the ellipsoid of possible paths is now smaller but the Earth is still inside of it. I haven't been able to locate any such diagrams on the net for the data at various dates, but they would be worth a look if they've been drawn yet. It would be interesting, for example, to see if the Earth's position is getting nearer to the edge of that ellipsoid, or getting nearer to the center of it. That would be, well, not predictive, but a help, hunch-wise. The data could always start to converge on a part of that ellipsoid that doesn't contain the Earth; that would be encouraging but only definitive if the data continued such a convergence. The problem is that we humans like to look ahead to where the data seems to be heading, as if the data changes had a path like a running rabbit in the weeds. But there is no guarantee in reality that such hunches are truly predictive. The future path of data through changes in the data itself is not really a path. For example, new refined positional data could get down to where there were only 4 to 1 odds against an impact (the Earth circle occupies 1/4 of the ellipsoid), and yet with the next refinement, the odds of impact could drop to 0% (the Earth circle is now outside a new smaller ellipsoid). Of course, if the very best data could only refine things to where the ellipsoid of paths overlapped only part of the Earth circle, and that was the best data we would ever have from this current approach, the outcome could remain uncertain for years. Wait and see. Sterling K. Webb -- Ron Baalke wrote: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 Don Yeomans, Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office December 24, 2004 2004 MN4 is now being tracked very carefully by many astronmers around the world, and we continue to update our risk analysis (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk) for this object. Today's impact monitoring results indicate that the impact probability for April 13, 2029 has risen to about 1.6%, which for an object of this size corresponds to a rating of 4 on the ten-point Torino Scale. Nevertheless, the odds against impact are still high, about 60 to 1, meaning that there is a better than 98% chance that new data in the coming days, weeks, and months will rule out any possibility of impact in 2029. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] meteorites and tsunamis
Hi, The very large U. of Arizona Press collection Hazards Due To Comets and Asteroids (1994) has in it a paper Tsunami Generated by Small Asteroid Impacts by Hills, Nemchinov, Popov, and Teterev. The classic Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Glasstone and Dolan is good too (it has a chapter on tsunamis). The figure of a 100 meter stone (or 40 meter iron) given by Herbert is a significant one. Smaller objects than these are likely to be slowed down considerably coming through the atmosphere (or break up altogether) with a serious loss of energy, but a 100 meter stone or 40 meter iron will reach the ground pretty much at its celestrial velocity. When you talk about a tidal wave's height, there are two heights. First, there's the height of the undisturbed free-travelling ocean wave, and second, the runup height which is the height the wave achieves when it runs up on the land and is forced higher and higher. Usually the runup height is 10 or more times higher than the ocean wave, depending on the characteristics of the shore and its shallows. In Sri Lanka a thousand kilometers or more from the epicenter, reports are of a 15 to 30 foot runup height. In Sumatra, the runup height must have been much greater, but there are few witness reports because anybody close enough to get a really good look died. Reading through these two sources, I get the impression that the recent tidal wave was somewhat smaller than that that would have been produced by a 100 meter stone hitting the ocean at the same spot. In evaluating that statement you should know that I think the recent disaster was much worse than we realize even now. There is a phenomenon of big disasters, that they so devastate certain areas that no word gets out at all and the full scale of the disaster is not appreciated. For example, on Sunday morning the deaths were given as 14,000 and today (Tuesday) the figure given is 52,000. I would not be surprised if the actual death toll when it is fully known were closer to 175,000 +/- 60,000. In Banda Atche (capital of the Sumatran province nearest the epicenter), a London Financial Times reporter interviewed survivors in neighborhoods where there were survivors and was told by the residents that the death toll was 80% of their neighborhoods. Banda Atche is a city of 100,000 people, so it's quite likely that there were 52,000 or more deaths in just that one city. A town of 10,000 people ten miles down the coast from Banda Atche has not yet even been reached by anybody from the outside, but flyovers have not spotted any living moving human beings there. Counted deaths in Sri Lanka are officially up to 22,000 and those figures do contain any reports from the rebel-controlled north of the island. And none of the counted death totals includes the large numbers of people that must have died when they were swept out to sea. But there are reports of very large numbers of corpses washing up on the Thai and Malaysian west coasts. At any rate, even this considerable catastrophe is less than what the smallest asteroid (100 meter) that could make it through the atmosphere full-tilt would produce. A 400 meter object like 2004 MN4 striking the ocean at 20 km/s would produce a tsunami about 100 times bigger than the recent one. It would achieve runup heights of about 200 feet even 1000-2000 kilometers away. So it's a really good thing that 2004 MN4 is going to miss us in 2029. Thanks to those pre-discovery plates, Herbert can get his sleep, none of us have to start building arks or move to mountain tops! Sterling K. Webb - harlan trammell wrote: i am looking for some definitive information in regard to the size of meteorites that could generate tsunamis like the big one in the indian ocean. is there any info on this? are their any graduate or doctoral level papesr published on this? __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Please edit messages
Darren Garrison wrote: Top posting is generally looked on rather negatively. I never thought about there being any existing protocol (i.e., my ignorance), but I use Netscape for mail and have for about eight years. In Netscape, top posting is the default setting for replies. I just used it as it came. What about other mail programs? Sterling K. Webb __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
