Everyone knows that a giant rock from outer space hit the planet millions of years ago
and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Now with advanced technology, researchers have been able to put together a new timeline
showing what really happened.
And not only this, they think they know where the giant asteroid came from.
Is Earth the target for another huge space rock, and would we be able to survive?
You’ll be surprised, and probably shocked at what NASA astronomers recently discovered.
So now get ready to experience the disaster that almost wiped out life completely on Earth.
The giant asteroid’s impact into shallow waters in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years
ago was bad enough.
But then an amalgam of additional disasters ensued: Rocks fell from the sky, wildfires
ignited and tsunamis inundated distant shorelines.
The researchers found that the first day of the Cenozoic was peppered with cataclysms
and released a new record of this day of chaos in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
Their timeline was developed using high-resolution photography, microscopy, computed tomography
imaging and magnetic measurements of hundreds of feet of sedimentary rock recently recovered
from Chicxulub, one of the largest impact craters on Earth…and it all began like this.
Imagine you were somewhere in North America about 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs
ruled the Earth, and you were looking up at the night sky.
You would have probably seen what appeared to be a bright star shining off into the distance.
But if you watched this peculiar light for an hour or two, the object would seem to grow
in brightness, but barely move.
What you would be looking at is not a star, but a huge asteroid somewhere between 11 to
80 kilometers wide [7 - 50 miles] on a direct intercept course with the Earth at 72,420
kilometers per hour [45,000 mph].
Hours later, the asteroid plows through Earth’s atmosphere heading straight for where the
Yucatán peninsula is today.
At impacts of that speed, Earth’s atmosphere acts like water.
Smaller space rocks, called meteors, hit the atmosphere like pebbles thrown into a pond,
and decelerate rapidly at high altitudes, burning away from the friction of the atmosphere,
while some bigger pieces of rock survive and fall to Earth.
But the mountain-sized Chicxulub asteroid hits our atmosphere like throwing a boulder
into a puddle.
It maintained its velocity and plunged through the entire 60 miles of atmosphere in just
three seconds.
The asteroid shrieks over Central America, emitting the mother of all sonic booms that
would shatter eardrums across all the continents.
The dinosaurs were likely terrified and running in all directions having no idea what was
just about to happen, but if any animal was close enough to see the asteroid, they would
have been instantly vaporized within minutes.
In fact, except for sea turtles and crocodiles, no four-legged animal larger than 25 kilograms
would survive…
The mountain-sized space rock falls so quickly that the air itself cannot escape.
Under intense compression, the air heats to thousands of degrees almost instantly.
Before the asteroid even hits, compressed superheated air vaporizes much of the shallow
sea that covers the Yucatán.
Milliseconds later, the rock plunges through what’s left and slams into bedrock.
In that moment, a chain reaction of events occurs.
The impacting asteroid exerts so much pressure on the Earth that soil and rock flow like
fluids.
The flowing up and down movement of the earth is like the double-splash of someone doing
a cannonball in a swimming pool.
The initial splash in all directions is followed by a delayed vertical splash when the cavity
created by the asteroid rebounds to the surface.
The first wall of earth gouged outward at the moment of impact is more than 32 kilometers
high [20 miles].
The impact hole nearly breaches Earth’s mantle, and when the cavity rebounds to form
the delayed vertical splash, the Earth rises at over 1,600 kilometers per hour [1,000 mph]
to heights taller than Mount Everest.
Within minutes this mountain of debris almost entirely collapses in a series of secondary
explosions, leaving behind a smaller mound called a crater’s peak ring.
At the same moment the asteroid strikes the Yucatán and applies its pressure to the bedrock,
it converts the kinetic energy of a 7.5 billion ton rock traveling 16 kilometers per second
[10 miles per second] into searing heat in an instant.
The Chicxulub impactor delivers approximately one septillion, three hundred sextillion kilojoules
of energy [1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000] More energy than one-billion Hiroshima atomic
bombs.
The kinetic energy transferred by the asteroid to the soil, rock, and air excites the molecules
to temperatures far hotter than the surface of the sun.
The heat rips electrons from atoms, ionizing the air into an expanding fireball of plasma
in excess of 10,000 degrees turbocharged with vaporized rock that is blasted out at hypersonic
speeds.
The heated, rapidly expanding air and near-instantaneous conversion of earth to gas combined with the
impact shockwave itself forms a massive blast wave of pressure expanding outward at more
than 1,600 kilometers per hour [1,000 mph].
If this asteroid hit the same spot today, the blast wave would vaporize you in Texas,
deafen you in New York, and blow out glass windows in Buenos Aires.
The Chicxulub impactor rings Earth like a bell.
Waves in Earth’s crust radiate away from the impact zone at 4 kilometers per second
[2.5 miles per second].
These waves then trigger fault-slipping earthquakes across the continents.
If you were on the other side of the world, you would feel the ground-shaking 30 minutes
after impact.
The impact triggers tsunamis as high as skyscrapers.
The first of them hit gulf coastlines within the hour.
Waves ranging from 600 feet to perhaps as tall as a 1,000 feet smash into what is now
Mexico and the southern United States and flood tens of miles inland.
The waves temporarily reverse the flow of rivers, rushing up river beds like 30-foot
tidal bores.
Tsunamis smash into the eastern coast of the United States, and six hours after impact,
max out at 600-foot-high walls of water that slam into Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean
coasts.
Within 15 hours of impact, waves arrive on every coastline on the planet.
Depending on local topography, the ocean sweeps away anything in its path and sucks it back
to the sea when the waters finally retreat.
It already sounds like Armageddon, but even more disasters are on their way.
When the big rock strikes, its splash accounts for 25 trillion tons of earth that it launches
on ballistic trajectories, some at speeds that exceed Earth’s escape velocity.
These rocks exited Earth’s gravitational pull to either orbit the Sun, and some of
this material probably reached the moon.
But the majority of ejected debris returned back to Earth within the hour.
These glass-like chunks, called tektites; some as large as buses, but most the size
of marbles, pelt the earth at speeds ranging from 160 to 320 kilometers per hour [100 to
200 mph] in lethal quantities.
Regardless of where any remaining dinosaurs were on Earth, they were hit with this fiery
hailstorm.
But these glass bullets didn’t need to hit the dinosaurs to be fatal.
As these tektites fall, their friction with the atmosphere emits enough thermal radiation
to set fires across the planet.
By some estimates, the combined heat of the returning embers heats the planet to the equivalent
of an oven set to broil.
Most of the world’s trees burn, which is perhaps why the only bird species that survive
the impact are those that nest on the ground.
Of the few larger land animals to avoid extinction, nearly all have some means of escaping the
heat.
They either could burrow like small mammals, snakes, and lizards, or escape into water,
like crocodiles or turtles.
Even if the poor dinosaurs were on the other side of the world, they would have needed
to find protection from the initial heat blast.
In a final piece of terrible luck for the dinosaurs, Chicxulub happens to strike an
area rich in oil and sulfur.
The impact ejects 100 billion tons of vaporized sulfur and 30,000 quadrillion gallons of water
into the atmosphere, which then condenses into massive storm clouds and falls back as
torrents of acid rain that acidified the oceans.
In the higher latitudes, continental-wide snow storms deposit tens of feet of snow per
day.
But the global deluge doesn’t last long, because in addition to water, Chicxulub vaporizes
and explosively ejects 150 football stadiums worth of oil from the Yucatán bedrock.
This oil condenses in the stratosphere as a black sooty layer covering the Earth like
a coat of black paint.
Unlike the sulfur and wildfire smoke, the carbon circulates high above the cloud layer
stopping it from raining back down.
And that becomes another big problem.
The soot layer remains in the atmosphere, reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches
Earth’s surface by 90 percent for at least two to three years.
The initial ovenlike heat brought on by the returning tektites is followed by a deep and
long-lasting freeze.
Global temperatures drop by an average of almost 50 degrees.
The only places on Earth to avoid this deep freeze are Madagascar, India, and Indonesia,
which were tropical islands during this time.
In the global chill, evaporation almost ceases dropping rainfall by 80 percent.
Nearly every spot on earth outside of these tropical islands dries into a desert.
Where did this giant rock come from, and is there another one out there headed for us?
Researchers using a supercomputer studied asteroid evolution using data from known asteroids.
The two-member team of Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj, suggested that the Chicxulub asteroid likely
originated from the Oort cloud; a sphere of debris at the edge of the solar system.
It could have been a much larger comet that was pushed off course by Jupiter’s gravitational
field and sent close to the sun where it broke into several pieces.
These fragments can cross the Earth’s orbit and hit the planet once every 250 to 730 million
years.
Judging from this study, it’s not a matter of if we could be hit by another giant rock
from outer space, but when.
On Saturday, December, 11, 2021, NASA revealed that a 330-meter long asteroid named 4660
Nereus screamed past Earth around 3.8 million kilometers [2.4 million miles] at a speed
of 6.5 kilometers per second [14,719 mph] While you might not think that is very close,
any slight deviation in its orbit could put it on a direct course with us and smash into
the Earth in the future.
Astronomers are tracking this potentially hazardous rock and say it will come within
1.1 million kilometers [745,000 miles] of Earth on Valentine’s day in 2060.
Buy your flowers and get those proposals done early just in case!
Keep in mind the asteroid that caused the Chelyabinsk explosion in Russia in 2013 was
just 20 meters in size.
The bad thing is that we don’t have any known way to defend the Earth from a giant
space rock.
However, NASA’s DART mission, or double asteroid redirection test, will try to see
if a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide
with it, causing an kinetic impact that could push the asteroid off a collision course with
the earth.
DART’s target is Dimorphos; an asteroid moonlet which orbits a larger asteroid named
Didymos.
The spacecraft is set to arrive in late September 2022 when the Didymos system is 11 million
kilometers [7 million miles] from Earth.
However, it is estimated that the collision will change the speed of the moonlet by a
fraction of 1%
Stopping a 10 kilometer wide or bigger asteroid hurtling towards the planet at more than 72,000
kilometers per second will take a lot more than a small spacecraft impacting it, perhaps
the world would need to try nuclear weapons like in the movie Armageddon.
Maybe you have an idea how we could stop a world ending asteroid, and you’ll become
famous!
Let us know what you think, and make sure to stay tuned here for more exciting stuff
happening in our universe.
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