Posted by Dee Norris
A recently discovered Apollo Asteroid, 2008 TC3, exploded over Sudan at about 1046 EDT on October 7, 2008.
2008 TC3 was discovered on Monday by an observer at the Mt Lemmon Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. 2008 TC3 is notable in that it is the first Asteroid of its size that was identified before impact and tracking it put the entire Spaceguard tracking system to an extreme test.
TC3 is estimated to be only two to five meters in diameter but exploded with the force of a one kiloton nuclear device. Asteroids of this size hit the Earth every few months according JPL scientists.
No deaths have been reported yet.
The important lesson here is that Spaceguard is able to identify and track these smaller objects as well as the larger ones. A 20 to 50 meter asteroid exploding over a major city could result in a significant loss of property and life. The most imagined dire consequences of AGW could never stack up to the actual consequences of a larger asteroid actually impacting nearly anywhere on the Earth. If for this reason alone, funding for space exploration needs to be continued.
More at:
UPDATE1: Please note that the use of an alarmist headline and imagery to increase the casual reader’s desire to look at the entire article was an intentional parody. – Dee
UPDATE2: See this article on whats happening in the world of astronomy due to this event. – Anthony
tty (03:33:20) :
Mary Hinge:
That the P/T extinction was caused by a runaway hothouse is very far from certain. It seems unlikely, but not impossible, that it was caused by a large asteroid or cometary impact. There are points for and against both theories. Read for example:Erwin, D. H. (2006). Extinction , for an up-to-date review.
Dee Norris (05:17:57) :
“The cause for the Permian–Triassic extinction event is still up for grabs, but it is more then likely that climate change would have been a consequence of the cause of the event, not the cause itself.”
I’m actually in total agreement with you here that there would have been a cause before the global warming episode. The Siberian Flats looks like the most likely culprit, these could of course have been set off by an impact or the antipode of an impact. All interesting stuff
BTW, “dialable yield” man portable devices (or “satchel nukes”) are reputed to be on the order of a kiloton. Very dirty though, at such a low mass fission rate.
There is no such thing as a “one kiloton nuclear device”.
Take a look at Nuclear Artillery.
@ur momisugly Mary Hinge:
Why would you think that any resulting climatic change would be warming? Most of the event causation theories would lead to cooling.
Please note that the use of an alarmist headline and imagery to increase the casual reader’s desire to look at the entire article was an intentional parody. – Dee
PUN INTENDED! LOOK! The pun WAS intended!! GOWD!
Hint: Nobody Cares If Your Puns Were Intended
Reply – I am sorry, perhaps I am a little obtuse, I am not clear where this pun you see lurks. Are you confusing parody with punning? – Dee Norris
@Patrick Henry:
New York City is due for a good shaking soon.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080821-new-york-earthquakes.html
Dee,
Good to know that Dr. Hansen will be safe, as he spends so little time in his Columbia University office these days.
The university culture at Columbia and Harvard through which Obama passed has been drenched in a reflexive anti-Americanism for several decades. Armchair blame-America-first leftism is the default mode. Disdain for the military is rampant, and conservative voices are rarely heard.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/10/08/palin/index.html
Wait! An impact caused the extinction of the mammoths? How can that be? A space object couldn’t possibly equal the destructive power of stick and stone wielding nomadic humans!
Tamara:
It would seem that it also took out the stick and stone welding Clovis people along with the horses, mammoths, giant sloths and most of the other North America mega-fauna. The bison would seem to be the only survivors.
To MarkW
I checked with the local observatory, but as a long standing amateur astronomer I had a good idea that this wasn’t a standard meteor. It ran from horizon to horizon for a start, it left a trail that glowed long after it had passed, like a plane’s contrail, only so long after sunset It couldn’t be one (we were into Astronomical Twilight), and it “sang”. Although there is no detectable sound from these phenomena observers all round the world and for many years have reported “Hearing” something. It may have been what the ancients called the music of the spheres and is clearly different from everyday(Night) sounds.
Re: a cosmic calamity in Canada. I have to look at Velikovsky’s work again. He mentions an old Native American legend of fire from the sky in ancient times,
if I remember correctly…
[…] dodged a bullet: A recently discovered Apollo Asteroid, 2008 TC3, exploded over Sudan … notable in that it is […]
Dee:
My archeology prof is gonna be ticked! (If he’s till around.)
Reply – So were the Clovis people! – Dee
OT.
Oh, boy.
They’re celebrating the current economic woes as a means to slow down global warming.
NICOSIA (Reuters) – A slowdown in the world economy may give the planet a breather from the excessively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions responsible for climate change, a Nobel Prize winning scientist said on Tuesday.
Atmospheric scientist Paul J Crutzen, who has in the past floated the possibility of blitzing the stratosphere with sulfur particles to cool the earth, said clouds gathering over the world economy could ease the earth’s environmental burden.
http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE4966A220081007
Dee Norris (05:17:57)
“Speaking of climate and in-bound asteroids, evidence is increasing that Younger Dras was triggered by an comet that exploded over Canada. This from July 2008 –
Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened By New Evidence Located In Ohio, Indiana”
The Late-Pleistocene impact hypothesis is certainly interesting, but I’ll patiently wait for Tankersley’s paper to be published. I was unaware that minerals could be sourced using x-ray diffraction, although it will certainly tell you that they are there. It would certainly seem to be a hot topic in the Pleistocene/Holocene geology field, and I know that this U of Cincinnati group is not the only one looking to evaluate the hypothesis.
My problem with the meteor impact people is that they believe that extraterrestrial sources are the cause of most mass extinctions. For example, one of the authors (Luann Becker of UC-Berkeley) on the Firestone et al (2007) PNAS paper that laid out the hypothesis of the Late-Pleistocene impact event has been on TV (History Channel or National Geographic) outlining the case for a impact event causing the End Permian extinction, but this is by no means settled.
The thing with large asteroids is that they are anything but subtle, so they are easy to pick out and link to extinctions, but poor adaptation to environmental changes, or loss in diversity etc ect are less easy to pick out and link more conclusively to extinctions. However, all might have been operative.
Some rather exciting news from the Southern Ocean:
“Hundreds of new marine species and previously uncharted undersea mountains and canyons have been discovered in the depths of the Southern Ocean, Australian scientists said Wednesday.
A total of 274 species of fish, ancient corals, molluscs, crustaceans and sponges new to science were found in icy waters up to 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) deep among extinct volcanoes, they said.
The scientists mapped undersea mountains up to 500 metres high and canyons larger than the Grand Canyon for the first time, the government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said.”
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081008131848.agfcky9e&show_article=1
@Drew Latta:
I think that when there are massive extinctions and civilizations collapse at about the same time as a large impact, Occam’s razor makes it a safe bet on the impact.
However, as I said already, the cause of the PT extinctions is still up for grabs and I agree there is still debate on cause of the KT extinctions. However I am 99.9% sure that both of these events were not anthropogenic. 😉
I wounder what portion of the asteroid was destroyed by anthropagenic CO2.
Did we just save the planet?
An actual impact could be significant, although fortunately our cities cover only a fraction of the globe. Indeed, the “Spaceguard” name first appeared in Arthur C. Clarke’s book “Rendezvous with Rama”, where the organization was founded after Europe was roasted by a rock which destroyed Venice. I don’t see recognition of the name’s origin in the Spaceguard Foundation’s documents, but Clarke was a trustee.
Cathy (08:42:22), from quoted article, “… clouds gathering over the world economy could ease the earth’s environmental burden.”
Yeah, right. Because air and water quality in prosperous countries such as the US, Canada, and most of Europe is so much worse than the pristine conditions in third-world countries or emerging third-world countries such as China. As if CO2 was the only “pollutant” that matters.
Got Alvarez?
I can’t imagine why the describe the explosion as 1 kilo-ton nuclear device. My only guess would be that the largest conventional bomb in use (that I’m aware of) is a 500 ton MOAB (mother of all bombs), and to use term nuclear to try to impress the public that this is a big explosion. I agree with some earlier posters…just say it exploded with the force of 1 kilo-tons of TNT. That would be 1/15 of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, of course 2 times the largest conventional bomb.
If warmists really believed in “the precautionary principle” they’d be screaming for more space defense funding. After all, the potential damage from an asteroid collision dwarfs IPCC predic–er, projections–of the impact of global wa–er, climate ch–er, climate chaos.
http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment08/idUSTRE4966A220081007
Climate scientist is thrilled by the economic mess. We may freeze and starve to death, but at least our CO2 is reduced.
“a Nobel Prize winning scientist “?
It seems that giving to Nobel Peace Price to the IPCC has suddenly increased the number of “Nobel Prize Winning scientists” by about an order of magnitude. I suppose that Steve MacIntyre can call himself a “Nobel Prize Winner” too, since he was a IPCC reviewer. In fact I almost wish he would, since all righteous MSM (including Reuter) would then undoubtedly discover the speciousness and arrogance of such claims.