An asteroid almost impacted the earth on Friday, November
6. As
usual, we got no warning from NASA, since it wasn't
discovered until the same day it almost hit us. At this rate we
won't survive until
2012!
An asteroid strike plays a major part in Whitley's upcoming
novel The Omega Point, which he will discuss on
Coast to
Coast AM on Thursday.
In the November 11th edition of the Daily Mail, Claire Bates
reports that it was the third-closest known (non-impacting)
earth approach for asteroid on record and says, "A similar
sized object slammed into
Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. The impact created a
blast so powerful it leveled 1,200 square miles of forest."
It's happened before: A mysterious basin off the coast of
India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the
world has ever seen. It may have been responsible for killing
the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.
Researcher Sankar Chatterjee is taking a close look at the
massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India
that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. He
says, “If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our
planet." By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan
Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the
dinosaurs, was between 5 and 6.2 miles wide.
If Chatterjee is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's
crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot
mantle material to well up in its place. The impact led to
volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India. Rocks
from the bottom of the crater will tell him if it was the result
of an asteroid impact, since asteroids are rich in iridium, and
the presence of that material is thought of as the fingerprint
of an impact (and ALSO of
implants of unknown origin.
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