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Blue Marble Shocks

Kanook Tlingit Nation

March 10th, 2010

Today I read that another possible impact to our home occurred some 145 million

years ago, or a bit less when an extraterrestrial object some 1.24 miles across

slipped through our atmosphere and slammed into what is known today as the

Democratic Republic of the Congo creating a 25.6 mile wide dent in the surface of

our earth.

This announcement sparked or re-kindled my interest in the effects of numerous

impacts our earth has experienced over its life, at least the part of its life we canidentify. Anything close to the moment of our birth, as an interplanetary body in

this solar system before 4.0 billion years ago I leave to the Albert Einstein and the

Steven Hawking crowd.

As to date, it appears that the largest verified impact crater on our home is the

Vredefort or Vredefort dome located in the province of South Africa, named after

the town of Vredefort which is situated near the center of impactI guess under the

assumption that lighting never strikes the same place twice, unless you happen to

be Lee Trevino who has been hit more times by lighting than the people of the

Old Testament.

The extraterrestrial space rock(asteroid) that bumped into the earth

at Vredefort is classed as the largest

ever to impact Earth, at least in the

last 4.6 billion years ago, albeit if our

scientist prove that the Wilkes Land

Crater is of extraterrestrial origin,

which would make it the largest at a

300 mile wide impact crater.

The Vredefort crater has a diameter of

155-186 miles and is said to have

been created by a rock some 6 miles

wide. This impact is believed to have

happened some 2 billion years ago

(2.023 billion +/- 4 million years, some

plus or minus when we count a 5

millisecond delay in downloading from

the Internet as a long time), during the

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Paleoproterozoic age (a period in our planets history when the continents are said

to have stabilized and when Cyanobacteria evolved, which is a type of bacteria that

uses a biochemical process of photosynthesis that produces energy and oxygen in

other words takes that harmful Al Gore evil chemical CO and turns it into

something that was good for our beginning). Albeit is the largest, it is not the oldest

in that it a little less (300 million years) younger than the Suavjarvi Crater inRussia1. And there is evidence of four additional impacts occurring some 3.2 to 3.5

million years ago found in the greenstone rocks around Barberton in South Africa

and in corresponding rocks in the eastern Pilbara block in Western Australia

however it is note that these impacts are no longer recognizable as structures on

the surface like Vredefort.

It was originally believed the dome in the center of the crater was the after effect

of a volcanic eruption, but in the late 1990s evidence showed that it was the site of

a huge bolide2 impact that showed shatter cones found in the nearby Vaal River.

This crater site is one of the few multi-ringed impact craters on our Blue Marble,

albeit they seem to be a common occurrence elsewhere in our Solar System with

the best example being the Valhalla Crater on Jupiters moon Callisto and we have

found numerous multi-ringed craters on our own home moon some 238,857 miles

(center to center) distant from our home. Scholars speculate that we might have

had other large impacts but the geological processes have erased their presence.

Within the area as in the Witwatersrand ridge it is noted that large deposits of

the precious metal gold have been found, whereas there are numerous waste

dumps from gold mining found along the south side of the Witwastersrand west of

Johannesburg and due north of Vredefort where you will find the dumps of

Carletonville and the huge mines of Klerksdorp and Welkom that sit north-west and

south-west of Vredefort a 6-mile wide rock slamming into the area more than

likely shook up the place and produced a tremendous amount of heat wouldntyou think?

The next largest verified impact is the Sudbury Basin, or Sudbury Structure

located in the Canadian Shield in Ontario, Canada in the city of Greater Sudbury it

is commonly referred to as The Valley. Within the Sudbury Basin are located the

Temagami Magnetic Anomaly, the Lake Wanapitei impact crater, and the western

end of the Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben it is said that none of the structures are

directly related to each other

in the sense of resulting

from the same geophysicalprocesses.

1Suavjrvi (Russian: ) is a lake and impact crater in the Republic of Karelia, Russia2 The word bolide comes from the Greek , (bolis) which can mean a missile or to flash.

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The Sudbury Basin is 38.5 miles long, 18.6 miles wide and 9.3 miles deep, and

was created by a 6.2 mile space rock hitting the area some 1.85 billion years ago

again in the Paleoproterozoic time frame. The debris from the impact was thrown

over an area of 617.763 square miles, consider that the State of Alaska, the largest

state of the United States is 663,268 square miles. Rock debris traveled in a

straight line as far as 497 miles. Its present size is considered to be a smaller

indication of a 155.3 mile crater that the rock originally created. Whereas

subsequent geological processes have changed the crater into its current smaller

oval shape, making it larger than the famous Chicxulub Crater in Yucatan, Mexico.Because of the considerable erosion (over 1.85 billion years) has occurred since

the Sudbury event, such as 3.73 miles in the North Range, there is considerable

difficulty in determining the actual size of the Sudbury crater in a sense the final

rim diameter.

Whether or not because of the impact, the Sudbury region is one of the worlds

largest mining communities, being for one the worlds largest supplier of nickel and

copper ores most mineral deposits are found on the outer rim of the basis

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deposits that include, besides nickel and copper, such as platinum, palladium, gold

and other metals. In addition due to the high mineral content of its soil, the floor of

the basin is among the best agricultural land in Northern Ontario, with too many to

count vegetable, beery and dairy farms, unfortunately due to its northern latitude it

only supplies products for local consumption and is not a major exporter of food

stuffs.

Downtown Sudbury

The 3rd largest verified impact was near the town of Chicxulub in the Yucatan

Peninsula in Mexico, whereas the Chicxulub Crater is some 111.8 miles in diameter,and the space rock that created the crater is estimated to be some 6.2 miles in

diameter.

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It was identified by a geophysicist working in the Yucatan region searching for oil

in the late 1970s, Glen Penfield who initially was unable to gather sufficient

evidence that the unique geological feature was in fact a crater, later contact with

Alan Hilderbrand he obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature

obtaining samples of shocked quartz

along with measurements indicating agravity anomaly and tektites in the

surround area.

Isotope analysis and the determination

of the age of rocks placed the impact at

some 65 million years ago, at the end of

the Cretaceous Period and age that

witnessed the extinction of the dinosaurs

as suggested by the K-T boundary3. Others

argue that the impact was not the sole

reason, but lately scientists have primarily

nailed down the cause of the extinction

being Chicxulub. Albeit it there is evidence

that the Chicxulub rock may have been a

piece of a much larger asteroid that broke up in a collision in distant space more

than 160 million years ago.

Gravity measurements

Glen Penfield had obtained a gravity map produced by Robert Baltosser in the 1960s, who had

been forbidden to publicize by Pemex, the Mexican government oil corporation, and Penfield in

his investigation found another arc on the peninsula whose ends were also pointing north.

Comparing the two maps he found they formed a circle with the center near the Yucatan

Village of Chicxulub and the rest is historyand as time would prove another impact produced

copious amounts of wealth, this time with oil.

3 The boundary marks the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic era, and isassociated with the CretaceousTertiary extinction event, a mass extinction.

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The 4th largest verified impact crater is the Popigai Crater in Siberia, Russia north of the

Siberian City Norilsk, the northernmost city in Siberia and the worlds 2 nd largest city after

Murmansk north of the Arctic Circle, and about 1.5 hours by helicopter from the outpost of

Khatanga (one of the most northern inhabited locations in Russia).

Where some 35.7 +/- 200,000 years ago another large space rock classified as either a 4.97mile diameter chondrite asteroid or a 3.1 mile diameter stony asteroid, regardless the impact

left a 62.14 mile diameter crater.

For decades the Popigai Crater was off-limits to scientists, because of the diamond mining

under Stalins regime, it wasnt until 1997 that a major investigation began in attempting to

determine the enigmatic structure.

It was determined that the shock pressures from the impact instantaneously transformed

graphite in the ground into diamonds within in a 8.5 mile radius of the impact point. Whereas

diamonds ranging from on the average 0.02 inches to 0.07 inches are found with some as big as

0.4 inches, diamonds that have inherited the tabular shape of the original graphite grains and

preserving the original crystals striations.

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Popigai Crater

There is a small possibility that the Popigai impact crater formed simultaneously witht eh 35million year old Chesapeake Bay and Toms Canyon impact craters, leading one to think that

maybe a much larger space rock broke into smaller segments outside of our atmosphere beforing

smacking into our Blue Marble. But here again, we see enormous amounts of resource wealth tie

to an impact crater.

Tied with the Popigai Crater for 4th place is the Manicouagan Reservoir an annular lake in

central Quebec, Canada, where the lake covers some 749.8 square miles with its eastern shore

accessible via highway Route 389.

Manicouagan Reservoir lies within the remnant of an ancient eroded impact crater that was

created when a 3.1 mile diameter crashed into the planet manufacturing a 62-mile diameter

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crater, that though erosion has been reduced to a visible diameter of 44.7 miles whereas it is

not kosher to have two number 4s it has been classified as the 5 th largest impact crater.

The impact caused a fireball as far away as present-day New York, a melting pot mixing the

Panagaean target area over 31 mile extent and 5.6 miles depth, a crater wall of 62.1 mile

diameter. Ejecta have been found as far as Britain

Ren-Levasseur Island in the background

Mount Babel at 3,123 feet, visible on Rene-Lavasseru Island is said to be the

central peak of the crater, formed by the post-impact uplift. Research has shown

that the impact melt within the crater has an age of 214 +/- 1 million years before

the end of the Triassic some 14.4 million years before the Triassic-Jurassic

extinction event, which is considered one of the major extinction events of the

Phanerozoic era, and event that eliminated 20% of all marine families. Obliviously

the impact could not have caused the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event.

Geologically the Manicouagan Reservoir is located north of the St Lawrence River,

whereas the reservoir was created by damming the arched Manicouagan and

Mouchalagan Lakes with their associated rives. There are five main rivers that

provide water for the reservoir, the Mouchalagane, Seignelay, Themines, Petite

Riviere Manicouagan and the Hart Jaune River the single river the Manicouagan

River provides the only outlet, the reservoir in the summer has an average dept of

26.3 feet and is fully of whitefish, the primary commercial species in the lake and its

waters after the main siltation event

subsided are considered pristine.

"Manic-5" or "Daniel-Johnson Dam

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The 6th largest impact crater, the Acraman Crater is located within the Grawler

Ranges of South Australia, whereas its location is identified by Lake Acraman, a

circular dry lake about 12.4 miles in diameter its discovery was first reported in

the journal Science in 1986, where the evidence of an impact included the presence

of shatter cones and shocked quartz in shattered bedrock on islands within the LakeAcraman.

The crater being eroded makes its original size difficult to determine its original

size whereas some scholars put it between 52.8 miles to 55.9 miles in diameter,

some others suggest a smaller size at 21.74 miles to 24.86 miles in diameter. The

larger size would suggest an estimated release of energy equal to 5,200,000

megatons of TNT. The estimate impact is said to have occurred some 580 million

years ago during the Ediacaran Period4, the age was not determined from the

crater itself but from the position of ejecta with nearby sedimentary basins.

As for the Gawler Ranges where the crater is located, they are a range of

mountains in South Australia there were formed by volcanic activity some 1,500

million years ago, to the north of the Eyre Peninsula. It was when Edward John Eyre

was exploring that he first recorded the sighting of South Australias floral emblemin 1839 the Sturt Desert Pea. It is being noted lately that the Gawler Craton is

rich in mineral resources, although many are only recently discovered and have not

yet to have been studied to determine their amount of their value.

4 The Ediacaran Period (pronounced /idikrn/; named after the Ediacara Hills of South Australia)is the last geological period of the Neoproterozoic Era and of the Proterozoic Eon, immediatelypreceding the Cambrian Period, the first period of the Paleozoic Era and of the Phanerozoic Eon.

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The ejecta layer has been found as far away as 186 miles east of the crater,

whereas during the timeframe the areas the ejecta were found were shallow seas,

and the ejecta settle into the sea bottom.

The 7th largest verified impact crater is the Chesapeake Bay impact Crater

formed by a collision of a space rock and the lower-end of Chesapeake Bay about35 million years ago approximately the same time as the impact in Siberia, the

Popigai impact. It is the largest impact crater in the USA.

3D model of the crater looking obliquely to the north.

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Chesapeake Bay

During the warm, late Eocene era sea levels were much higher than today,

whereas the tidewater region of Virginia lay the coastal shallows and the eastern

shore of North American were covered with dense tropical rainforests, and the

waters of the continental shelf were rich in marine life, who when they died

deposited dense layers of lime from their microscopic shells.

The space rock zooming in at many miles per second slammed into the lower

Chesapeake deep into the sediments burying itself into the granite continental

basement rock. It is safe to state that the rock was vaporized, but not before it

fractured the basement rock to a depth of 5 miles, and creating a peak ringaround the point of impact.

The deep crater it created is some 23.6 miles across, surrounded by a flat-floored

terrace-like ring through with an outer edge of collapsed blocks forming ring faults.

The circular crater is observed at approximately 52.8 miles in diameter and around

4,265 feet deep, and has an area twice the size of Rhode Island and nearly as deep

as the Grand Canyon.

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David Powers, a USGS scientist describes the event of the day, Within minutes,

millions of tons of water, sediment, and shattered rock were cast high into the

atmosphere for hundreds of miles along the eastern seaboard. An enormous

seismic tsunami engulfed the land and possibly even overtopped the Blue Ridge

Mountains. The sedimentary walls of the crater progressively overtime slumped in

and widen the crater and formed a layer of huge blocks on the floor of the ring-like

trough. The entire impact event lasted only a few hours or at maximum days

whereas in the perspective of geological time the rubble or (impact breccia 5) the

3,937 foot breccias is an instantaneous deposit. The crater was then buried by

additional sedimentary beds that have accumulated over the 35 million years.About 200 miles to the northeast, on the continental shelf off the coast of New

Jersey an impact occurring in the same timeframe, the Toms Canyon impact crater,

is believed to have happened in the same impact event as the Chesapeake Bay

event.

Number eight on our list of impact craters, based on their size is the Puchezh-

Katunki impact crater in the Chkalovsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in the

Volga Federal District in Russia. The crater albeit not visible on the surface, has a

diameter of 49.7 miles and is estimated to have occurred some 167 +/- 3 million

years ago, placing it in the Middle Jurassic.

5Breccia (pronounced /br ti, br i/, Italian: breach) is a rock composed of angular fragments ofminerals or rocks in a matrix (cementing material), that may be similar to or different from thecomposition of the fragments. The word is a loan from Italian, and in that language indicates bothloose gravel and stone made by cemented gravel. A breccia may have a variety of different origins, asindicated by the named types including sedimentary breccia, tectonic breccia, igneous breccia, impactbreccia and hydrothermal breccia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Englishhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language

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Early Jurassic paleogeographic map showing the Puchezh-Katunki (PK) impact crater(circle, not to scale) and location of reported possible impact indicators (dots) from the

Triassic-Jurassic boundary and Early and Middle Jurassic.

Jzsef Plfy puts forth his study on whether or not the Puchezh-Katunki structurelocated at the Volga River some 248 miles northeast of Moscow as a possibleimpact event causing a mass extinction, whereas today its impact date doesntseem to match any events.

He notes that the results of the multidisciplinary scientific investigations, includingthe drilling of a 3.32 mile deep Vorotilovskaya borehole which was drilled at the

craters center, finding that the material revealed the age to be Bajocian or MiddleJurassic. He doubts this date.In his analysis he not only doubts the date, but the fact that the Puchezh-Katunki

impact is in question when it comes to an extinction event, comparing it to thesomewhat larger Popigai and Chesapeake Bay impacts which are not tied to anextinction event, he also refers to the study done by Plotnick and Sepkoski (2001)where their model suggests that an extinction magnitude is not exclusivelycontrolled by the impact size or force, but it also depends on the state of thebiosphere at the time of impact in other words is there is nothing of significant ofsize or value of what there is to kill. The conclusion of his paper, calls for a better definition of the impact date,

whereas his notes that the existing K-Ar radiometric ages are scattered between the

Triassic-Jurassic boundary and Early Jurassic and that the possibility cannot be ruledout that the Puchezh-Katunki impact is equal to either the end Triassic or the Early

Jurassic (Pliensbachian-Toarcian) extinctions.

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The geologic cross-section of the Puchezh-Katunki crater [1, 2] (left panel) incomparison with the numerical modeling results (right panel). Light gray colorcorresponds to the sedimentary layer. Deep gray color shows unfragmented

basement rocks. Initially horizontal lines show displacement and deformation ofrocks around the crater.

The 9th impact crater listed is the Morokweng Crater buried beneath the Kalahari

Desert near the town of Morokweng in the Northwest Province of South Africa.

On June 29th, 2006 an account was published that said that a crater larger than

the city of London (ranging from 43.4 miles in diameter, whereas others report a

crater diameter as large as 99.4 miles) that was created by a 3 to- 6 miles in

diameter space rock. The article reported that an international group had

accidentally found a fragment of an asteroid in the Morokweng crater. Whereas Dr

Ian McDonald and Adrian Boyce were assisting a mining company search for copper

and nickel in the crater and in the drilling of one of their boreholes found a 9.8 inch

fragment of what appeared to be a meteorite at a depth of 2,526 feet.

Analysis of the fragment revealed that it was made of LL Chrondite which

accounts for 9% of meteorites that our Blue Marble runs into from time-to-time,they are believe to originate from the primary asteroid belt between Mars and

Jupiter further drilling in the crater also revealed more pebble-sized pieces.

One fact that went against conventional theory, which is because of the left-over

material, twisted the model that large asteroids, usually are traveling around

44,739 mph when they slam into Earth and most always are obliterated, whereas

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this meteor is estimated to have been traveling in the neighborhood of 33,554 mph,

that is for any of it to survive.

The estimated age of the impact is 145 million years plus or minus 800,000 years,

placing it on the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary discovered in 1994 it is another

crater that is not exposed to the surface but was found during magnetic and

gravimetric surveys.

What the Morokweng asteroid may have looked like as it hit the Earth 144 millionyears ago

The 10th impact crater, in size is the Kara meteor crater located in the Yugorsky

Peninsula in Nenetsia (the latest population estimate is 42,000 plus), Russia, a 40.4

mile in diameter crader with an estimated age of impact at 70.3 +/- 2.2 million

years old or the Upper Cretaceous period. Impactite debris found on the Baydarata

Gulf shore northeast of the crater indicate that original size of the crater could have

been 74.6 miles in diameter this is another crater that is not exposed to the

surface.

The crater is situated in the southeastern end of the Yugorsky Peninsula, while the

Ust-Kara site lies offshore, 9.3 miles east of the small Kara or Karskaya Grub inlet.

The Ust-Kara site was formerly believed to have been two-separate impacts,

whereas today it is believe to be one impact whereas the Suevite outcrops that

supported the previous theory are only part of the Kara impact structure. It is this

change in belief that now estimates the larger size of the crater.

The Kara River basin, located between the Pai-Khoi ridge and the Baydarta Gulf of

the Kara Sea is 124 miles north of Vorkuta, Russia where in the 1970s the impact

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structure was verified. The sparsely inhabited area with its vegetation mostly intact

is an important region for reindeer herders, whereas only a few fishermen, Nenets

(tribe of indigenous people), and geologists occupy the vast tundra in the

summertime. The Ust-Kara village at the mouth of the Kara River has only a few

hundred year-round inhabitants.

The Suevite outcrops, the older ones and the new ones are shown in the image

above, field work in the summer of 2001 revealed impact outcrops 34.2 miles

northeast from the Kara Crater with its center at the Syadmayakha River area. It is

believed that this sites and the mineral and sedimentary rock breccias may

represent the crater floor deposits, simply because a triple Kara structure consisting

of three separate craters would be suspect, in addition the older theories are not

supported by the gravity and other data sets, arriving at the simplest explanation

with a 74.5 mile diameter crater. The above image outlines the impact area at the

74.5 mile crater with the primary impact outcrops shown in red. The region is rich

in natural gas deposits.

Gravity Study

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