An embarrassed Carl writes:
1. Since there are high levels of iridium, is it safe to assume
it was a stony asteroid or comet but not an iron?
2. If it was an iron asteroid, since it was the size of Mount Everest and
going at near cosmic speed, would it have gone thru the Earth?
Hello Carl and List,
Maybe you remember that Frank Kyte (University of California, Los Angeles)
found a tiny,
2.5-4 mm-wide piece of light-colored clay on the bed of the Pacific Ocean. He
split it open
and found what he believes to be a fossil meteorite, the possible remnant of
the K-T impactor.
The amount of iron, chromium, and iridium it contained nicely fits the ranges
of these elements
in carbonaceous chondrites. But Kyte was confronted with one problem: he also
found much more
gold in this sample than would be expected in a chondritic meteorite. Kyte was
sure it must have
been a stony object because the material he found (or what was left of it) was
not porous enough
to have come from a comet.
As for going through the Earth: Although the Mount Everest is a huge chunk of
rock,
a 10-15 km chunk of asteroidal material like the K-T impactor can only
"scratch" at
the surface of this 12,000+ km planet we call Earth. It takes a much larger
impactor
to cause a radical change of a planet's rotation period or its axial tilt.
Well, I know the dinosaurs would vehemently disagree ;-)
Best wishes,
Bernd
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