#chicxulub impactor

[cyanogen-miasma]

fun fact this is somehow the first time I've ever successfully finished a PMV for myself despite years of training in animation memes and MAP parts

omg it's Space Cats guys remember Space Cats?

[atlastfree]

Two Earthlings by Griffith B.F. Sissel

Plain text below the cut. ♡♡♡

I have accepted it.

I am the body that

you bury in the ground.

I have accepted it, and I forgive you—

that I was born to sculpt sacred halls

so that the dead might live forever,

but denied hearth and home for

the crimes of thieves and beggars.

Nothing learned but how to gore,

and all our cries are heard as roars.

No wonder you hate us so;

no wonder no one comes close.

And while I know I’m not your only monster,

I’ll never really understand all the same

why you never sang any songs about me.

You never wrote down my name.

Trapped in a prison of gold,

cursed to wander alone,

never led to the door,

always lost, but not looked for.

So when they named me

for the mountain that upholds Ra,

they had been fools for naming me

anything at all.

A generation passes, another stays,

their deaths known as kindly fates.

A prince at peace, another cursed,

since the time of the ancestors.

Just know I have always loved our kind—

it's why I painted tombs with stars,

even though you’ll never know me

as anything more than a scar—

my legacy now nothing more

than endless taunt, and twisted horns.

A story millennia old,

a truth that never gets told.

I have accepted it.

I am a monster to the world,

and, in a way, I’ll live forever.

I have accepted it, because I love you,

I was born to to give my body to the living,

so that the stars can be their home.

When they pointed and called me doom,

they’d already built houses from my bones.

“Your verdict was cruel,” but if that’s true,

their survival should make them cruel, too.

No wonder we scorched the Earth;

we’re lost stars without a hearth.

And while I know I’m not their brightest fire,

I’ll never really understand their truth.

They never sing any songs about me,

they never say, “I love you, too.”

My rib, given to the land that serves as my grave,

my fire, a worldwide, Promethean, iridium anomaly.

For I so loved all life to come,

that, with a kiss, I made us one.

And so you named me

everything from “flea,” to “Babylon,”

and eventually, “a child

who should have never been named at all.”

So I ask, Mahaf, cloaked in dark,

before you row your ferryman’s arc,

before you sail through reeds to Aaru,

please steady the later, please hold it true.

Reach out a hand for the son of Set Maat,

and help him board the fleet.

He is too young to walk in sandals well,

and frightened to touch the sand with his bare feet.

We are kin in tale and thorn,

in legacies of twisted horns.

A story millennia old,

a truth that never gets told.

I have accepted it.

I am a monster in the ground,

and, in a way, I’ll live forever.

[dinosaurnews]

via

[vensosaurus]

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

66 Million Years Ago

Now, in the grand scheme of things, 11 to 81 kilometers isn’t that big, especially compared to the planet itself.  The mass of the asteroid was less than that of a single mountain range, but it's important to understand how it compares to the fluids on the surface.

The atmosphere stretches about 100 kilometers high, but at that altitude it’s so thin it’s practically a vacuum; most of it is densely packed into the first 10 kilometers.  The lower limit to the size of the Chicxulub asteroid is still taller than the majority our atmosphere; as it hit the Earth, it’s far side was still in space!

Here’s a map of the impact site, the Yucatan peninsula on the Gulf of Mexico:

The underwater portions on this map are still part of the continental shelf, so the maximum depth of the water would be about 100 meters.  To scale with our atmosphere it looks like this:

You can’t even see the dark blue strip on the bottom! The asteroid wouldn’t even notice the water.  It would hardly notice the atmosphere!  Whenever it’s depicted in a textbook or on TV, it looks like this:

as if it’s streaking through our atmosphere and burning up on entry.  That could not be less accurate.  It would be moving so fast you wouldn’t even be able to see it.  It’s an asteroid orbiting the sun at the same distance as Earth, and if we assume it has the same orbital velocity as Earth, it would be moving at 107,000 kilometers per hour; that’s almost 30 kilometers per second.  One second it’s in outer space, the very next second it has impacted the Earth; it wouldn't be slowed down by the atmosphere at all, it’d be over before you even realized it was coming.  At that speed, a spacecraft could go from Earth to the Moon in 3.5 hours.

The asteroid would displace both the water and the atmosphere as it impacted, pushing it, compacting it into a wall of gas; wind speeds would be astronomical as 11 kilometers of oxygen and nitrogen are pushed out of the way in a fraction of a second.  All of the water would be pushed out of the way in an instant by Mega-Super-Ultra-Hurricane-force winds, so the asteroid would impact the dry seafloor (though again, this all happens so fast it would be impossible to observe)

It would strip away the atmosphere; hell, it would start stripping away the Earth itself!  The impact would release more energy than every nuclear bomb ever detonated combined, literally punching a hole in the Earth’s crust.  The resulting crater is 20 kilometers deep and 150 kilometers wide.

Seismic waves propagate through rock at about 6 kilometers per second, so if the energy traveled straight through the Earth’s core it would take almost 40 minutes for the earthquake to be felt on the opposite side of the world (a point in the Indian Ocean between Australia and Madagascar).  If you were in Indonesia when it impacted, you’d probably see it before you felt it.  The asteroid would have ejected so much molten material into space at such high velocities that the fallout would orbit the Earth and rain down all over the planet in a matter of minutes.  The horizon would light up all around you as the sky literally caught fire in every direction you looked.

From the impact site, the wall of fire and molten crust thrown outward at the surface would reach over 1000 kilometers away.  In a matter of seconds, the firestorm would kill everything from Miami to New Orleans to Mexico City, pretty much the entirety of the Caribbean and Central America.  All over the world, you’d feel the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, and while most of the water within several hundred kilometers would have been vaporized, the resulting tsunami would destroy the entire Atlantic coasts of the Americas and Africa. The waters would flood inland up the Mississippi River valley maybe as far as modern Memphis.  As it propagated, West Africa would be devastated, the Iberian peninsula would be devastated, Northern Europe and the Arctic would be devastated,

It would be the apocalypse.

[lizajane2]

“If a meteor struck the earth and killed the dinosaurs, i should be able to see the rock.”

Please, i cannot and should not be feeling like fucking Einstein. There’s no way people can be THAT… well, stupid. I’m sorry kinda not really though. Because when something like that is six miles wide, traveling almost 60 times greater than the speed of sound, heats up upon entering the earth’s atmosphere, and impacts the earth at 18,000 degrees, it vaporizes everything. INCLUDING the meteor itself.

It was so fucking hot that the earth’s atmosphere acted like boiling oven. Like the thermal impulse itself was creating energy fluxes. And the sulfur and dust that was released blocked out the sun. Which dropped temperatures for years.

I shouldn’t feel like i have a phd in paleontology and a geologist major on top of that.

[ashleybenlove]

The thing that’s wild about Armageddon is that all the objects that impact Earth related to the asteroid hit major cities (NYC, Shanghai, Paris) but there’s so much focus on like, images of people in small town America that look like it’s from the 1950s. But yeah, there’s the occasional shot of other non-American folks.

Really, it’s probably more likely that impactors would hit in the water because this planet is mostly water.