Hazardous space rocks
Artist's depiction of asteroid hitting Earth (NASA)
Greg Easterbrook: The most important message about the threat of asteroid and comet strikes on Earth is that it now looks like, from current science, that these events are not rare and are not confined to the primordial mists.
That’s Greg Easterbrook, a fellow with the Brookings Institution. He said that for over 20 years he’s followed research and talked wth scientists about rocks in space striking the Earth. He speculated about one asteroid that he said hit the Indian Ocean around 5,000 years ago.
Greg Easterbrook: Had it hit the land, most life on Earth might have been wiped out, just as happened during the time of the dinosaurs. The strike in the ocean was hardly benign. It appears to have caused a global tidal wave more than a dozen times as high as the tsunami that struck Indonesia four years ago.
Easterbrook said NASA only spends four million dollars a year to track potentially hazardous astreroids.
Greg Easterbrook: It’s nowhere near enough to do a systematic scan of the sky.
And if a killer asteroid were spotted?
Greg Easterbrook: Most likely, what would be necessary to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth would be to change its course. Your inital attempt would not be to blow it to smithereens, although maybe that would be necessary. It would be much more economical to simply change the course of the object coming toward Earth.
Is Easterbrook speculating that an asteroid hit the Indian Ocean 5000 years ago or does he have compelling geological evidence? If it’s the latter, then how do I find out more about it?
The preliminary evidence is based on satellite measurements of sea surface depressions that indicate what appears to be a huge crater, called the Burckle Crater, in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar.
It remains controversial because detailed evidence of impact features at Burckle require acoustical data that hasn’t been collected yet, but the crater’s detection sparked researchers to form the Holocene Impact Working Group, led by Earth scientist Dallas Abbott of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
There’s also enormous sedimentary deposits called ‘chevrons’ in Madagascar, containing ocean fossils fused with metals commonly formed by asteroid impacts. The New York Times did a story on this in 2006, Ancient Crash, Epic Wave, and Easterbrook has more recently written about it in his March 2008 story for The Atlantic, The Sky Is Falling. The impact from this proposed asteroid would have been of ‘biblical’ proportions, indeed.
i wish news storys like this didnt happen so often.not becuse its alarmist which it is.we clearley can not do much about it if a big rock did hit the earth.but becuse it all ties in with the concpiracy of a new world order.if you would like to know why go to the discloser project web site and check out there 2hr long press conferance where you have some VIPs exgovernment and us millitery people and the like basicly saying that we have not only had alien contact but also that we have “back engenerd alien artifacts! but enyway if you go in to it a littal you will find a woman with big hair sorry i forget her name and she says there is a list of government “threts to humanity” after terrorisum there is astaroid impact as the next big public terror aparantley this will smooth the way to the weponisation of space which i think has already happed enyway now you might accuse me of scairmongering but if this comes as big news it will just end up deeperning peoples fears by the way she said aliens are the next one after that. THE DISCLOSER PROJECT is the website if you dont beleve me.
I will look to the skies on April 13, 2029 (For real Friday 13) and see if I can spot Apothesis. It is expected to pass within the Clarke Belt but miss Earth, but can be seen from Earth’s surface. It is big enough to take out Texas.
What is that planet that can be spotted near the sun when I take a picture of it?