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Old 04-30-2004, 06:23 PM   #5 (permalink)
Rodney
Observant Ruminant
 
Location: Rich Wannabe Hippie Town
Oh, there's an asteroid coming, eventually. But I doubt that this guy knows much of anything.

We've had three separate meteor/asteroid events in the last 100 years that might have caused terrible devastation in a 10-15 mile region if anybody had lived around there -- the midair explosion of what was probably a dead comet over Siberia in the early 1900s, a rock of apparently several hundred feet in diameter that came down deep in the South American jungle in the '30s, and a pretty-good-size rock that hit Greenland several years ago. In all cases, the strike was so remote that nobody was around at the time or was ever able to get there. The South American strike is only known because a lot of people saw a fireball coming down, but nobody ever saw it strike or found the crater. It was out in the jungle somewhere where nobody lived (nobody who sent out messages, anyway) and probably was overgrown in a few years. Nobody ever got to the site of the Greenland strike, either. An expedition tried, but failed.

But if any of those strikes had been in a major metro area, millions might have been killed. And an ocean strike of a 2-300 foot rock could really sweep clean adjacent coastlines. I've read that a 1000-foot rock coming down in the Pacific would generate tidal waves that would reach 1000-1500 feet at the shoreline....

...and scientists believe that 1 to 3 rocks in the 100-to-1000-foot size range hit earth every century. Just a matter of time.
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