EARTHSC 1121 Lecture 5: 1/24
9 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
~40,000 metric tons of extraterrestrial matter is accreted by the earth every year. Something with a 1 meter diameter falls every year. Something the size of an suv falls ~every decade. Every few 10s of thousands of years, something the size of a football field hits the earth. No one has been killed by a meteorite. 130 meters across; 300,000 ton iron-nickel meteorite. Silica glass at the bottom of the crater--there was so much heat that the quartz in the soil was melted. Jupiter pulled comet apart string of comets that got strung out, passed around the. Sun, and shoemaker & levy saw this and were able to predict that it would crash back into jupiter, which it did. When you hit a planet really hard with a large object, you create a lot of heat. Parents were filming a football game and actually caught the fireball on video. Not the only extinction event in earth"s history.
