Was an asteroid responsible for the extinction of life 65 million years ago?
About sixty-five million years ago a fireball as large as Halley's comet, about ten kilometers in diameter, hit the Earth, forming a crater 300 kilometers wide and 24 kilometers deep in just a few seconds. The impact raised 200,000 cubic kilometers of earth and rocks, caused earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic phenomena and enormous fires. The dust and fumes remained in the atmosphere for years, causing the planet to cool.
As a result of all this, sixty-five to seventy percent of living beings on Earth became extinct, including the dinosaurs.
The crater still exists today, in the Yucatan, and it is just one of the many craters on Earth that testify to how our planet, and not just the moon and Mars, has been and still is the target of celestial bodies.
The asteroid impact hypothesis
Until fifty years ago, the possibility that a celestial body could fall to Earth was considered science fiction and anyone who hypothesized this was a catastrophist, who knows why, against progress. Over the years, the opinions of catastrophists were increasingly taken into consideration also because there was no lack of evidence, just think of the Meteor Crater in Arizona.
In 1908 in Tumbuska, Siberia, a mass of ice with a diameter of one hundred meters fell from the sky. The impact released a force six hundred times greater than the Hiroshima bomb which in a few seconds razed eighteen hundred square kilometers of forest to the ground; if it had fallen on Paris or London there would have been nothing left. Years pass and the presence of meteorites occurs without a shadow of a doubt [1] and in 1992 a celestial body was filmed disintegrating a few kilometers from the earth [2] . Other dangerous "pebbles" have been found in various parts of the world. One of them is particularly interesting.
In the Koran there is talk of a certain Aad who mocked Allah and because of him the city over which he reigned, Ubar, was destroyed by a "black cloud" brought by a very strong wind. In 1932 Harry Sr. John “Abdullah” Philly found a strange area in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula where remains of black glass, fragments of white rock and fragments of iron coexisted. The place was called by the Arabs Al-Hadida (the iron thing) and was the site of the city of Ubar (which the English mangled into Wabar). The city had been hit and immediately destroyed by a meteorite which split into at least three parts upon impact. One of these pieces weighing 2200 kilos was transported to Riyadh, to King Saud University, and is now on display in the Saudi Arabia's capital. According to researcher Elisabeth Thomsen, the Kaaba, the sacred black stone object of Muslim worship preserved in Mecca, is also a piece of impactite from the destruction of Ubar-Wabar.
Another stone fell to the earth in Ensisheim in 1492, it weighed only 130 kilos but soon became famous thanks to the printing of some single-sheet almanacs that an amateur poet, Sebastian Brant, published in the nearby city of Basel. The fall of the meteorite published in 21 issues of Brant's almanac was from time to time the sign of the glory of Emperor Maximilian, the divine sign for the declaration of war on France and for the war on the Turks as well as the prophetic sign of the death of father of the emperor, Frederick.
Brand, given the economic success of his almanacs written in Latin, began printing them in vernacular German, opening himself up to the bourgeois world and decided to change profession: from a poet he became perhaps the first "journalist" of whom we have any trace. After being painted by Durer in 1500, the stone was studied by Paracelsus who in the Liber Meteororum concluded that meteorites were objects formed by the condensation of the firmament, a statement that attracted the ire of the citizens of Basel who saw a divine miracle in the stone.
Every year around 12,000 celestial bodies with a maximum diameter of about one meter fall to the earth, but thousands of bodies with unstable orbits rotate around the Earth, some of which have a diameter of over 2,000 meters.
Although ninety percent of the Earth is not inhabited, these phenomena are almost there for everyone to see. Only to stay in Italy in recent years: in 1988 a meteorite fell in front of the entrance to the Aeritalia space industry while in 1996 a meteorite weighing ten kilos stuck in a field in Fermo under the eyes of some people. The meteorite is preserved in the museum of the town of Ascoli. Other impacts have truly been before the eyes of all the inhabitants of the Earth. In July 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into the surface of Jupiter. This impact allowed us to have a more realistic vision of the effects of an impact with a cosmic body than that reconstructed on a computer.
Until a few years ago, around two hundred asteroids were known to be "dangerous" because they were close to the Earth and with a diameter of about one kilometre, but since the data collected by the system of artificial satellites called "defensive shield", or stellar” whatever you want, the data has changed a lot. These satellites put into orbit around the Earth in the early 1980s by NASA to monitor any space activity of the Russian "enemy" collected information not only on the Russian's activity but also on the movement around the Earth of other bodies never known before.
In addition to the Earth, there are also other planets in the solar system, two of which, Jupiter and Saturn, are large enough to attract astral bodies from outside the solar system and cause them to change orbit, as happened for example in 1994 to the comet Shumacher Lady which crashed into Jupiter. The Solar System, which until a few years ago was seen as an orderly and precise system, is increasingly revealing itself to be something very similar to an enormous billiard table where millions of balls run wildly from one side to the other, colliding and pushing other balls into new orbits. Thinking that the Earth can go through a similar situation unscathed is like thinking that you can continuously cross a highway blindfolded without being hit.
In recent years the scientific community has begun to consider these celestial projectiles as a serious danger and some observatories have begun to monitor these bodies, called NEOs (Near Earth Objects). The commitment of governments is poor to say the least if you consider that a nation like Great Britain has only three people dealing with this, and only since the year 2000.
Talking about the possibility of cataclysms and extinctions that could happen always inspires a certain repulsion, it's like when you don't want to go to the dentist because you know you have a decayed tooth, but there's no use pretending nothing happened, the problem exists and it's a terrible threat full of precedents.
Paleontologist John Sepkoski discovered a certain repetitiveness in the mass destruction that occurred on Earth. Every twenty-six million years, a red dwarf star called Nemesis, rotating around the sun, would pass near the Orte Cloud, disturbing millions of comets that can head towards the sun and therefore also towards the Earth. If this were the case, starting from the Cambriano era there would have been twenty-three catastrophes of cosmic origin. At least five of these mass destructions are accepted by paleontologists.
In the Paleozoic era two occurred, one 435 and the other 360 million years ago, causing the death of tens of thousands of species of marine organisms;
the third occurred 250 million years ago, 95% of living beings were destroyed and another ten million years passed for life to reaffirm itself on Earth;
in the Mesozoic era, 205 million years ago, almost all reptiles and amphibians were destroyed;
at the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs were destroyed and with them 65% of living species also disappeared.
In the 1970s in Walla-Walla Valley in Washington state, USA, geologist Richard Waitt discovered traces of sediment in basaltic rocks, a sign that a large impact mass had split the rocks leaving the sediments. The cause was attributed to glacial Lake Missoua: an embankment of the lake collapsed, flooding western Montana, northern Idaho and eastern Washington state for an area equal to that of Romania. The event occurred at the end of the last ice age, but what had caused it?
According to computer analysis, if a body with a diameter of fifteen hundred meters fell into the sea twenty-five miles south of New York, all of New England would be destroyed by a wave of water, mud and vapor. Is it possible that such events happened in the past and left no traces?
A population of North America, the Utes, tell a legend according to which their ancestors saw a chariot of fire fall on Coon Mountain. Exactly in that place is the Meteor Crater, or the Devil's Crater. About 200 meters deep and one kilometer wide, it is thought to have been produced by a meteor one hundred meters in diameter [3]. So the Ute legend, more than a fantasy, is the handed down visual testimony of an event that occurred 20,000 years ago.
But do these events that happened so long ago still happen? Is it possible that in the current state of knowledge no one is interested in these potential dangers that overwhelm us and that in the era of global communication no one informs us? Yes, it is possible, very possible given that no one has an interest in raising alarms against a danger that is difficult to predict and impossible to avoid. Blind fatalism is better than useless alarmism.
It is now accepted by the entire scientific world that an asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago, this can be unequivocally deduced from the traces of Iridium present in the crater it caused in the Yucatan and in the surrounding lands. In the rocks of the earth there is a small yellow stripe called KT that marks the border between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary: the moment in which an astral body impacted the earth.
The dust raised by the impact obscured the sun for a few years, photosynthesis was interrupted, plants died and species became extinct in a chain, including Dinosaurs. The discussion on the dimensions of the asteroid is still open but while we are discussing what happened 65 million years ago in November 1996 a celestial body of "dangerous" dimensions for the continuation of life in the event of impact passed very close to the Earth risking up to at the last moment of being attracted to it. So no one knew until the last moment if and where that celestial body would end up. Perhaps due to an oversight, no media alerted the world population. Yet it would have been a journalistic "scoop"! The narrow escape was reported in some small news reports in newspapers and on televideo three months later, in January and February 1997.
Unfortunately it was not an isolated case of either narrow escape or bad information because three years later the following news appeared:
"A large asteroid narrowly missed the Earth - writes The Times of London. According to astronomers at Cornel University in Puerto Rico, asteroid 2000QW7 passed last Friday (09/01/2000) at about four million kilometers from Earth, a minimum distance in spatial terms. For astronomers, the discovery of 2000QW7, originating from the belt between Mars and Jupiter, is important for closely studying a potentially dangerous asteroid" [4] .
This is the world we live in, where we get up every morning, have breakfast and go to work, if they told us that in a month an asteroid could destroy part of the Earth would we still be worried about the mortgages to pay? Who would still go to work? Would there still be this political, economic and religious stability? Who should take on the commitment to warn and divert millions, billions of people from their daily dreams? Since there are no antidotes to these falls, who would take on the task of warning the world that perhaps it is dying? Without talking about what would happen in the case of an unsuccessful alarm, of a danger escaped at the last moment. Who takes responsibility for the safety and error of calculations?
The near destruction of the human race which occurred suddenly for still unspecified causes, but easily attributable to an impact with an astral body, also comes to us from the medical world. Ulf Gyllesten, of the Swedish University of Upsala, led a research group on the genetic configuration of 53 people with different ethnic-geographical origins. By studying the sequence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) inherited maternally and present in the 53 subjects, we saw how the genetic material develops over time. Since mtDNA is inherited through the mother and changes regularly over time, it can be used as a "molecular clock" for the study of human history. The article published in the journal Nature informs us that the original stock of humanity was located in Africa and that although it had developed enormously for about 100,000 years, about 40,000 years ago the world population was suddenly reduced to 40,000 people [5].
Further support for the theory of the sudden destruction of parts of the human race also comes from a Mayan manuscript from the Le Plongeon collection, now in the British Museum. From it we are informed that
“In the year of 6 Kan, on the 11th Muluc, in the month of Zac, earthquakes occurred until the 13th Chuen. The hill country of Mud and the land of Mu were sacrificed. Having risen twice, they disappeared..... The remaining lands, raised several times, also sank. 64 million inhabitants perished, eight thousand years before this writing."
These are the numerical terms of what happened a few thousand years ago, in historical times, and how many people died.
Today the numbers would not be fewer.
In December 1997, an American researcher, Jim Scotti, discovered an asteroid later named 1997XF11 which, according to current calculations, in 2028 will pass at a "dangerous" distance from Earth, that is, so close that it could be attracted into Earth's orbit, causing it to fall to Earth.
But 1997XF11 is not alone, here are some asteroids of more than three hundred meters in diameter considered "dangerous" that will approach the Earth in the coming years:
- 07/08/2027 asteroid 1999AN10, diameter 1Km, expected distance equal to the Earth-Moon distance;
- 10/26/2028 asteroid 1997XF11, diameter 2 km, distance 2.5 Earth-Moon;
- 07/14/2060 asteroid Nereus, diameter 900 meters, distance 3.2 Earth-Moon;
- 09/23/2060 asteroid 1999RQ36, diameter 300 meters, distance 2.5 Earth-Moon.
These are just the asteroids discovered in recent years (the date of the sighting can be seen from the first number of the acronym). To these must be added those sighted for the first time of which nothing is known: a thousand per year.
While waiting for AN10, I remind you that the impact on Earth alone of a celestial body with a diameter of seventy-five meters would destroy a city causing a 1.7 km crater; an asteroid with a diameter of 350 meters would destroy the entire metropolitan area with a crater diameter of 7 km, while a fall into the sea would cause waves over forty meters high; a body with a diameter of seven hundred meters would destroy the whole Lombardy, leaving a 12 km crater, while in the sea it would cause waves capable of involving the entire Earth; a body with a diameter of 1.7 km would destroy all Italy, leave a 30 km crater, have repercussions on the Earth's climate and destroy the ozone layer.
If we consider that there are hundreds of impact craters on the Earth's surface, some of which have a diameter exceeding one hundred kilometers, we quickly deduce that during its life the Earth has received several violent visits that have left their mark.
The unifying theory of geology, plate tectonics, is based on the human law of gradualism according to which Natura non Facit Saltum (Nature does not make leaps). Unfortunately it is a human law, just, correct, but not always connected to reality.
It may also be true that nature does not proceed in leaps, but it is equally true that external agents such as celestial bodies have caused leaps, usually in a destructive sense, as nature proceeds.
Bibliography
- There is a BBC film broadcast on 29 October 2000 on "the Time Machine", network 4
- see note 1
- Spedicato, “Apollo objects…
- From Rai teletext 05/09/00 at 1130
- From Madre Tierra Year III N°236, Editorial La Capital , Buenos Aires, 31 December 2000
