3-10-2010 Impactors
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Transcript of 3-10-2010 Impactors
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Blue Marble Shocks
Kanook Tlingit Nation
March 10th, 2010
Today I read that another possible impact to our home occurred some 145 million
years ago, or a bit less when an extraterrestrial object some 1.24 miles across
slipped through our atmosphere and slammed into what is known today as the
Democratic Republic of the Congo creating a 25.6 mile wide dent in the surface of
our earth.
This announcement sparked or re-kindled my interest in the effects of numerous
impacts our earth has experienced over its life, at least the part of its life we canidentify. Anything close to the moment of our birth, as an interplanetary body in
this solar system before 4.0 billion years ago I leave to the Albert Einstein and the
Steven Hawking crowd.
As to date, it appears that the largest verified impact crater on our home is the
Vredefort or Vredefort dome located in the province of South Africa, named after
the town of Vredefort which is situated near the center of impactI guess under the
assumption that lighting never strikes the same place twice, unless you happen to
be Lee Trevino who has been hit more times by lighting than the people of the
Old Testament.
The extraterrestrial space rock(asteroid) that bumped into the earth
at Vredefort is classed as the largest
ever to impact Earth, at least in the
last 4.6 billion years ago, albeit if our
scientist prove that the Wilkes Land
Crater is of extraterrestrial origin,
which would make it the largest at a
300 mile wide impact crater.
The Vredefort crater has a diameter of
155-186 miles and is said to have
been created by a rock some 6 miles
wide. This impact is believed to have
happened some 2 billion years ago
(2.023 billion +/- 4 million years, some
plus or minus when we count a 5
millisecond delay in downloading from
the Internet as a long time), during the
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Paleoproterozoic age (a period in our planets history when the continents are said
to have stabilized and when Cyanobacteria evolved, which is a type of bacteria that
uses a biochemical process of photosynthesis that produces energy and oxygen in
other words takes that harmful Al Gore evil chemical CO and turns it into
something that was good for our beginning). Albeit is the largest, it is not the oldest
in that it a little less (300 million years) younger than the Suavjarvi Crater inRussia1. And there is evidence of four additional impacts occurring some 3.2 to 3.5
million years ago found in the greenstone rocks around Barberton in South Africa
and in corresponding rocks in the eastern Pilbara block in Western Australia
however it is note that these impacts are no longer recognizable as structures on
the surface like Vredefort.
It was originally believed the dome in the center of the crater was the after effect
of a volcanic eruption, but in the late 1990s evidence showed that it was the site of
a huge bolide2 impact that showed shatter cones found in the nearby Vaal River.
This crater site is one of the few multi-ringed impact craters on our Blue Marble,
albeit they seem to be a common occurrence elsewhere in our Solar System with
the best example being the Valhalla Crater on Jupiters moon Callisto and we have
found numerous multi-ringed craters on our own home moon some 238,857 miles
(center to center) distant from our home. Scholars speculate that we might have
had other large impacts but the geological processes have erased their presence.
Within the area as in the Witwatersrand ridge it is noted that large deposits of
the precious metal gold have been found, whereas there are numerous waste
dumps from gold mining found along the south side of the Witwastersrand west of
Johannesburg and due north of Vredefort where you will find the dumps of
Carletonville and the huge mines of Klerksdorp and Welkom that sit north-west and
south-west of Vredefort a 6-mile wide rock slamming into the area more than
likely shook up the place and produced a tremendous amount of heat wouldntyou think?
The next largest verified impact is the Sudbury Basin, or Sudbury Structure
located in the Canadian Shield in Ontario, Canada in the city of Greater Sudbury it
is commonly referred to as The Valley. Within the Sudbury Basin are located the
Temagami Magnetic Anomaly, the Lake Wanapitei impact crater, and the western
end of the Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben it is said that none of the structures are
directly related to each other
in the sense of resulting
from the same geophysicalprocesses.
1Suavjrvi (Russian: ) is a lake and impact crater in the Republic of Karelia, Russia2 The word bolide comes from the Greek , (bolis) which can mean a missile or to flash.
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The Sudbury Basin is 38.5 miles long, 18.6 miles wide and 9.3 miles deep, and
was created by a 6.2 mile space rock hitting the area some 1.85 billion years ago
again in the Paleoproterozoic time frame. The debris from the impact was thrown
over an area of 617.763 square miles, consider that the State of Alaska, the largest
state of the United States is 663,268 square miles. Rock debris traveled in a
straight line as far as 497 miles. Its present size is considered to be a smaller
indication of a 155.3 mile crater that the rock originally created. Whereas
subsequent geological processes have changed the crater into its current smaller
oval shape, making it larger than the famous Chicxulub Crater in Yucatan, Mexico.Because of the considerable erosion (over 1.85 billion years) has occurred since
the Sudbury event, such as 3.73 miles in the North Range, there is considerable
difficulty in determining the actual size of the Sudbury crater in a sense the final
rim diameter.
Whether or not because of the impact, the Sudbury region is one of the worlds
largest mining communities, being for one the worlds largest supplier of nickel and
copper ores most mineral deposits are found on the outer rim of the basis
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deposits that include, besides nickel and copper, such as platinum, palladium, gold
and other metals. In addition due to the high mineral content of its soil, the floor of
the basin is among the best agricultural land in Northern Ontario, with too many to
count vegetable, beery and dairy farms, unfortunately due to its northern latitude it
only supplies products for local consumption and is not a major exporter of food
stuffs.
Downtown Sudbury
The 3rd largest verified impact was near the town of Chicxulub in the Yucatan
Peninsula in Mexico, whereas the Chicxulub Crater is some 111.8 miles in diameter,and the space rock that created the crater is estimated to be some 6.2 miles in
diameter.
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It was identified by a geophysicist working in the Yucatan region searching for oil
in the late 1970s, Glen Penfield who initially was unable to gather sufficient
evidence that the unique geological feature was in fact a crater, later contact with
Alan Hilderbrand he obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature
obtaining samples of shocked quartz
along with measurements indicating agravity anomaly and tektites in the
surround area.
Isotope analysis and the determination
of the age of rocks placed the impact at
some 65 million years ago, at the end of
the Cretaceous Period and age that
witnessed the extinction of the dinosaurs
as suggested by the K-T boundary3. Others
argue that the impact was not the sole
reason, but lately scientists have primarily
nailed down the cause of the extinction
being Chicxulub. Albeit it there is evidence
that the Chicxulub rock may have been a
piece of a much larger asteroid that broke up in a collision in distant space more
than 160 million years ago.
Gravity measurements
Glen Penfield had obtained a gravity map produced by Robert Baltosser in the 1960s, who had
been forbidden to publicize by Pemex, the Mexican government oil corporation, and Penfield in
his investigation found another arc on the peninsula whose ends were also pointing north.
Comparing the two maps he found they formed a circle with the center near the Yucatan
Village of Chicxulub and the rest is historyand as time would prove another impact produced
copious amounts of wealth, this time with oil.
3 The boundary marks the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic era, and isassociated with the CretaceousTertiary extinction event, a mass extinction.
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The 4th largest verified impact crater is the Popigai Crater in Siberia, Russia north of the
Siberian City Norilsk, the northernmost city in Siberia and the worlds 2 nd largest city after
Murmansk north of the Arctic Circle, and about 1.5 hours by helicopter from the outpost of
Khatanga (one of the most northern inhabited locations in Russia).
Where some 35.7 +/- 200,000 years ago another large space rock classified as either a 4.97mile diameter chondrite asteroid or a 3.1 mile diameter stony asteroid, regardless the impact
left a 62.14 mile diameter crater.
For decades the Popigai Crater was off-limits to scientists, because of the diamond mining
under Stalins regime, it wasnt until 1997 that a major investigation began in attempting to
determine the enigmatic structure.
It was determined that the shock pressures from the impact instantaneously transformed
graphite in the ground into diamonds within in a 8.5 mile radius of the impact point. Whereas
diamonds ranging from on the average 0.02 inches to 0.07 inches are found with some as big as
0.4 inches, diamonds that have inherited the tabular shape of the original graphite grains and
preserving the original crystals striations.
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Popigai Crater
There is a small possibility that the Popigai impact crater formed simultaneously witht eh 35million year old Chesapeake Bay and Toms Canyon impact craters, leading one to think that
maybe a much larger space rock broke into smaller segments outside of our atmosphere beforing
smacking into our Blue Marble. But here again, we see enormous amounts of resource wealth tie
to an impact crater.
Tied with the Popigai Crater for 4th place is the Manicouagan Reservoir an annular lake in
central Quebec, Canada, where the lake covers some 749.8 square miles with its eastern shore
accessible via highway Route 389.
Manicouagan Reservoir lies within the remnant of an ancient eroded impact crater that was
created when a 3.1 mile diameter crashed into the planet manufacturing a 62-mile diameter
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crater, that though erosion has been reduced to a visible diameter of 44.7 miles whereas it is
not kosher to have two number 4s it has been classified as the 5 th largest impact crater.
The impact caused a fireball as far away as present-day New York, a melting pot mixing the
Panagaean target area over 31 mile extent and 5.6 miles depth, a crater wall of 62.1 mile
diameter. Ejecta have been found as far as Britain
Ren-Levasseur Island in the background
Mount Babel at 3,123 feet, visible on Rene-Lavasseru Island is said to be the
central peak of the crater, formed by the post-impact uplift. Research has shown
that the impact melt within the crater has an age of 214 +/- 1 million years before
the end of the Triassic some 14.4 million years before the Triassic-Jurassic
extinction event, which is considered one of the major extinction events of the
Phanerozoic era, and event that eliminated 20% of all marine families. Obliviously
the impact could not have caused the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event.
Geologically the Manicouagan Reservoir is located north of the St Lawrence River,
whereas the reservoir was created by damming the arched Manicouagan and
Mouchalagan Lakes with their associated rives. There are five main rivers that
provide water for the reservoir, the Mouchalagane, Seignelay, Themines, Petite
Riviere Manicouagan and the Hart Jaune River the single river the Manicouagan
River provides the only outlet, the reservoir in the summer has an average dept of
26.3 feet and is fully of whitefish, the primary commercial species in the lake and its
waters after the main siltation event
subsided are considered pristine.
"Manic-5" or "Daniel-Johnson Dam
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The 6th largest impact crater, the Acraman Crater is located within the Grawler
Ranges of South Australia, whereas its location is identified by Lake Acraman, a
circular dry lake about 12.4 miles in diameter its discovery was first reported in
the journal Science in 1986, where the evidence of an impact included the presence
of shatter cones and shocked quartz in shattered bedrock on islands within the LakeAcraman.
The crater being eroded makes its original size difficult to determine its original
size whereas some scholars put it between 52.8 miles to 55.9 miles in diameter,
some others suggest a smaller size at 21.74 miles to 24.86 miles in diameter. The
larger size would suggest an estimated release of energy equal to 5,200,000
megatons of TNT. The estimate impact is said to have occurred some 580 million
years ago during the Ediacaran Period4, the age was not determined from the
crater itself but from the position of ejecta with nearby sedimentary basins.
As for the Gawler Ranges where the crater is located, they are a range of
mountains in South Australia there were formed by volcanic activity some 1,500
million years ago, to the north of the Eyre Peninsula. It was when Edward John Eyre
was exploring that he first recorded the sighting of South Australias floral emblemin 1839 the Sturt Desert Pea. It is being noted lately that the Gawler Craton is
rich in mineral resources, although many are only recently discovered and have not
yet to have been studied to determine their amount of their value.
4 The Ediacaran Period (pronounced /idikrn/; named after the Ediacara Hills of South Australia)is the last geological period of the Neoproterozoic Era and of the Proterozoic Eon, immediatelypreceding the Cambrian Period, the first period of the Paleozoic Era and of the Phanerozoic Eon.
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The ejecta layer has been found as far away as 186 miles east of the crater,
whereas during the timeframe the areas the ejecta were found were shallow seas,
and the ejecta settle into the sea bottom.
The 7th largest verified impact crater is the Chesapeake Bay impact Crater
formed by a collision of a space rock and the lower-end of Chesapeake Bay about35 million years ago approximately the same time as the impact in Siberia, the
Popigai impact. It is the largest impact crater in the USA.
3D model of the crater looking obliquely to the north.
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Chesapeake Bay
During the warm, late Eocene era sea levels were much higher than today,
whereas the tidewater region of Virginia lay the coastal shallows and the eastern
shore of North American were covered with dense tropical rainforests, and the
waters of the continental shelf were rich in marine life, who when they died
deposited dense layers of lime from their microscopic shells.
The space rock zooming in at many miles per second slammed into the lower
Chesapeake deep into the sediments burying itself into the granite continental
basement rock. It is safe to state that the rock was vaporized, but not before it
fractured the basement rock to a depth of 5 miles, and creating a peak ringaround the point of impact.
The deep crater it created is some 23.6 miles across, surrounded by a flat-floored
terrace-like ring through with an outer edge of collapsed blocks forming ring faults.
The circular crater is observed at approximately 52.8 miles in diameter and around
4,265 feet deep, and has an area twice the size of Rhode Island and nearly as deep
as the Grand Canyon.
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David Powers, a USGS scientist describes the event of the day, Within minutes,
millions of tons of water, sediment, and shattered rock were cast high into the
atmosphere for hundreds of miles along the eastern seaboard. An enormous
seismic tsunami engulfed the land and possibly even overtopped the Blue Ridge
Mountains. The sedimentary walls of the crater progressively overtime slumped in
and widen the crater and formed a layer of huge blocks on the floor of the ring-like
trough. The entire impact event lasted only a few hours or at maximum days
whereas in the perspective of geological time the rubble or (impact breccia 5) the
3,937 foot breccias is an instantaneous deposit. The crater was then buried by
additional sedimentary beds that have accumulated over the 35 million years.About 200 miles to the northeast, on the continental shelf off the coast of New
Jersey an impact occurring in the same timeframe, the Toms Canyon impact crater,
is believed to have happened in the same impact event as the Chesapeake Bay
event.
Number eight on our list of impact craters, based on their size is the Puchezh-
Katunki impact crater in the Chkalovsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in the
Volga Federal District in Russia. The crater albeit not visible on the surface, has a
diameter of 49.7 miles and is estimated to have occurred some 167 +/- 3 million
years ago, placing it in the Middle Jurassic.
5Breccia (pronounced /br ti, br i/, Italian: breach) is a rock composed of angular fragments ofminerals or rocks in a matrix (cementing material), that may be similar to or different from thecomposition of the fragments. The word is a loan from Italian, and in that language indicates bothloose gravel and stone made by cemented gravel. A breccia may have a variety of different origins, asindicated by the named types including sedimentary breccia, tectonic breccia, igneous breccia, impactbreccia and hydrothermal breccia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language -
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Early Jurassic paleogeographic map showing the Puchezh-Katunki (PK) impact crater(circle, not to scale) and location of reported possible impact indicators (dots) from the
Triassic-Jurassic boundary and Early and Middle Jurassic.
Jzsef Plfy puts forth his study on whether or not the Puchezh-Katunki structurelocated at the Volga River some 248 miles northeast of Moscow as a possibleimpact event causing a mass extinction, whereas today its impact date doesntseem to match any events.
He notes that the results of the multidisciplinary scientific investigations, includingthe drilling of a 3.32 mile deep Vorotilovskaya borehole which was drilled at the
craters center, finding that the material revealed the age to be Bajocian or MiddleJurassic. He doubts this date.In his analysis he not only doubts the date, but the fact that the Puchezh-Katunki
impact is in question when it comes to an extinction event, comparing it to thesomewhat larger Popigai and Chesapeake Bay impacts which are not tied to anextinction event, he also refers to the study done by Plotnick and Sepkoski (2001)where their model suggests that an extinction magnitude is not exclusivelycontrolled by the impact size or force, but it also depends on the state of thebiosphere at the time of impact in other words is there is nothing of significant ofsize or value of what there is to kill. The conclusion of his paper, calls for a better definition of the impact date,
whereas his notes that the existing K-Ar radiometric ages are scattered between the
Triassic-Jurassic boundary and Early Jurassic and that the possibility cannot be ruledout that the Puchezh-Katunki impact is equal to either the end Triassic or the Early
Jurassic (Pliensbachian-Toarcian) extinctions.
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The geologic cross-section of the Puchezh-Katunki crater [1, 2] (left panel) incomparison with the numerical modeling results (right panel). Light gray colorcorresponds to the sedimentary layer. Deep gray color shows unfragmented
basement rocks. Initially horizontal lines show displacement and deformation ofrocks around the crater.
The 9th impact crater listed is the Morokweng Crater buried beneath the Kalahari
Desert near the town of Morokweng in the Northwest Province of South Africa.
On June 29th, 2006 an account was published that said that a crater larger than
the city of London (ranging from 43.4 miles in diameter, whereas others report a
crater diameter as large as 99.4 miles) that was created by a 3 to- 6 miles in
diameter space rock. The article reported that an international group had
accidentally found a fragment of an asteroid in the Morokweng crater. Whereas Dr
Ian McDonald and Adrian Boyce were assisting a mining company search for copper
and nickel in the crater and in the drilling of one of their boreholes found a 9.8 inch
fragment of what appeared to be a meteorite at a depth of 2,526 feet.
Analysis of the fragment revealed that it was made of LL Chrondite which
accounts for 9% of meteorites that our Blue Marble runs into from time-to-time,they are believe to originate from the primary asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter further drilling in the crater also revealed more pebble-sized pieces.
One fact that went against conventional theory, which is because of the left-over
material, twisted the model that large asteroids, usually are traveling around
44,739 mph when they slam into Earth and most always are obliterated, whereas
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this meteor is estimated to have been traveling in the neighborhood of 33,554 mph,
that is for any of it to survive.
The estimated age of the impact is 145 million years plus or minus 800,000 years,
placing it on the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary discovered in 1994 it is another
crater that is not exposed to the surface but was found during magnetic and
gravimetric surveys.
What the Morokweng asteroid may have looked like as it hit the Earth 144 millionyears ago
The 10th impact crater, in size is the Kara meteor crater located in the Yugorsky
Peninsula in Nenetsia (the latest population estimate is 42,000 plus), Russia, a 40.4
mile in diameter crader with an estimated age of impact at 70.3 +/- 2.2 million
years old or the Upper Cretaceous period. Impactite debris found on the Baydarata
Gulf shore northeast of the crater indicate that original size of the crater could have
been 74.6 miles in diameter this is another crater that is not exposed to the
surface.
The crater is situated in the southeastern end of the Yugorsky Peninsula, while the
Ust-Kara site lies offshore, 9.3 miles east of the small Kara or Karskaya Grub inlet.
The Ust-Kara site was formerly believed to have been two-separate impacts,
whereas today it is believe to be one impact whereas the Suevite outcrops that
supported the previous theory are only part of the Kara impact structure. It is this
change in belief that now estimates the larger size of the crater.
The Kara River basin, located between the Pai-Khoi ridge and the Baydarta Gulf of
the Kara Sea is 124 miles north of Vorkuta, Russia where in the 1970s the impact
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structure was verified. The sparsely inhabited area with its vegetation mostly intact
is an important region for reindeer herders, whereas only a few fishermen, Nenets
(tribe of indigenous people), and geologists occupy the vast tundra in the
summertime. The Ust-Kara village at the mouth of the Kara River has only a few
hundred year-round inhabitants.
The Suevite outcrops, the older ones and the new ones are shown in the image
above, field work in the summer of 2001 revealed impact outcrops 34.2 miles
northeast from the Kara Crater with its center at the Syadmayakha River area. It is
believed that this sites and the mineral and sedimentary rock breccias may
represent the crater floor deposits, simply because a triple Kara structure consisting
of three separate craters would be suspect, in addition the older theories are not
supported by the gravity and other data sets, arriving at the simplest explanation
with a 74.5 mile diameter crater. The above image outlines the impact area at the
74.5 mile crater with the primary impact outcrops shown in red. The region is rich
in natural gas deposits.
Gravity Study
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