Max Wolf was an experienced astronomer. He discovered more than 248 asteroids in his lifetime. Wolf suggested that the atmospheric phenomena could be explained as the tail of a comet penetrating Earth’s atmosphere.
The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory reported a decrease in atmospheric transparency during the following several months.
The ozone layer above a large area was destroyed, leaving extensive territory in Siberia unprotected from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
R. P. Turco et al. wrote that there was a stratospheric ozone reduction as large as 45 percent in the first year, with significant reductions persisting for at least three more years. Ozone depletion above 10 km altitude was found to be about 85 percent for several months and higher yet at 20, 30, and 40 km.
The explosion was registered by seismic stations across Europe and Asia. Meteorologists registered fluctuations in the atmospheric pressure. The powerful atmospheric pulse circled the Earth twice.
When the meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere, the weather was hot and dry, a perfect day for buildup of static electricity and powerful electric discharges.
Some researchers, including Konstantin K. Khazanovitch-Wulff, suggested that the electrical discharges were so powerful because they hit a Triassic volcano. The electrical conductivity of the volcano vents is better than the surrounding ground. Some places and extinct volcanos are like lightning rods.
No impact crater is still found. Most of the meteorite was vaporized and pulverized. Tiny brilliant spheres of cosmic origin were found in the area of the Tunguska meteorite fall. They were found as pellets embedded in the ground and in the trees.
Research trips uncovered tiny silicate and magnetite spherules in the soil. A high percentage of nickel was found in some of these spheres, suggesting bolide impact.
Research of the bog areas uncovered evidence of an extraterrestrial impact. Sediment layers in the bogs contain different amounts of various carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen isotopes than the layers from before and after the explosion. The layer formed in the year 1908 contains larger amounts of iridium.
In the article “Discovery of iridium and other element anomalies near the 1908 Tunguska explosion site,” published in Planetary and Space Science, Q. Hou, P. Ma, and E. Kolesnikov wrote, “According to the Ir flux in the explosion area, it can be estimated that the celestial body weighed more than 3.5×104 tons, corresponding to > 60 m in diameter, and might have released energy equivalent to more than 106 t of TNT. If the projective was a comet, the total mass was more than 7×106 tons, and the diameter of core was more than 160 m.”
K. Rasmussen, H. Olsen, R. Gwozdz, and E. Kolesnikov wrote in their article “Evidence for a very high carbon/iridium ratio in the Tunguska impactor,” Meteoritics & Planetary Science, that “the impactor material found in this study points towards a cometary type impactor, rather than a chondritic or achondritic asteroidal type impactor.”
“In the layer of the bogs corresponding to 1908, we found much more iridium,” said Mikhail Nazarov, head of the Laboratory of Meteoritics.
Mikhail Nazarov said that if the body entered the atmosphere just five hours later, it would have hit St. Petersburg and destroyed it.
If the Tunguska explosion happened over a large metropolitan area, it would devastate it, killing off millions of people. It would look very much like a nuke airburst of 600 to 1000 Hiroshima bombs, but worse.
The Little Boy nuke exploded over Hiroshima with the energy equivalent of 16 kilotons of TNT. The Tunguska explosion was estimated at about10 to 15 megatons TNT.
There would be three major devastating explosions: an airburst of the meteorite above the metropolitan area with the power of hundreds of nuclear bombs, a superpowerful electric discharge, and a detonation of the father and the mother of the thermobaric bomb.
The aftermath would be much more severe than in Siberia because the large number of grounded metal structures and electrical grids would create a perfect environment for super-powerful discharge.
The electric discharge, the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), and the geomagnetic storm would destroy the electronic equipment and power grids in the epicenter and in the adjacent areas.
The burst would cause radio and TV interference, including the disruption of radio signals over the entire continent. Some satellites would lose control for several hours. All trees would be destroyed. In Tunguska 80 million trees died.
Water pipes and gas pipes would go off, heated by the electric discharge. All weapon ammunitions, all gas stations and gas tanks of all vehicles (cars, buses, bikes, trucks, aircrafts, etc.), chemical tanks, or nearby nuclear warheads (in the form of dirty bombs or nuclear blasts) would explode simultaneously. The hot fuel in the hot polluted air in the entire metropolitan area would produce the largest ever thermobaric (fuel-air) bomb. The blast wave would destroy unreinforced buildings, infrastructure, equipment, and would kill and injure all people in the area. The antipersonnel effect of the blast wave is more severe in enclosed spaces such as buildings, subways, caves, and bunkers. People would be killed by the pressure wave, the severe burns, and the hot, poisonous atmosphere, by inhaling the burning fuel, and the subsequent thinning of the air (hence vacuum bomb), which ruptures the lungs. Thermobaric bombs are extremely lethal in urban areas.
In popular culture and reference writings the phrase is popular, “One EMP burst and the entire area goes dark.” Well, not exactly. Most probably there would more than enough light, just the source of light would be different—lots of fires, glowing rubble because of the ionizing radiation, and glowing night skies. Several days after the Tunguska explosion people in a large area from England to China could read their clocks and newspapers, even take photos with their very primitive wooden photo cameras at night.
Millions of people would be dead because of the blast wave, earthquake, fires, intense light pulse, electric shock, X-rays, neutron emission, electric discharges, etc. Several years after the explosion a majority of the injured people would die because of radiation sickness, a result of the ionizing radiation.
The Tunguska explosion is just a toy bomb compared to the Armageddon-like K comet events.
The Encke comet and the Tunguska meteorite explosion could be a good model to explain the K-Pg mass extinction caused by the intrusion of a comet, including the loss of atmosphere. Of course, the scale of the K comet events was much larger.
The core of a large cometary fragment entering Earth’s atmosphere becomes positively charged; the trail in the wake, negatively. The coma, the tail, and the cometary dust are negatively charged before entering the atmosphere; they are all forming together with the cometary trail in the wake a giant, negatively charged construction, reaching far beyond Earth’s atmosphere. For a short time there springs into existence a giant supercharged electromagnetic dipole of ionized super-hot core, air, coma, tail, and dust, which creates a super-powerful electric discharge, many times more powerful than the entire nuclear stockpile on Earth.
The Cretaceous atmosphere was much denser than the modern atmosphere. The air friction would cause much higher temperatures, much hotter and denser charged plasma, leading to more powerful discharge than if the comet hit today. The oxygen level of the Cretaceous atmosphere was higher and in result the explosion and burning would be more powerful and more devastating. There was a great amount of powerful discharges within the dipole, preceding the explosion of the cometary fragment, between the core of the fragment and the trail in the wake, which is in a formation with the huge coma, stretching far beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
The amount of the electric potential energy depends on the size, altitude, and speed of the meteorite. Nevsky calculated that the Tunguska meteorite exploded at an altitude of 12 to 20 km. The larger the fragment, the higher altitude of explosion. The K comet fragment was huge and the atmosphere was denser, so the electric discharge and the explosion occurred at a very high altitude. The denser Cretaceous atmosphere would more easily b
reak the cometary fragments and cause many airbursts.
The electric discharges created a giant column of superheated ionized air that rushed explosively into space. The giant ballistic plume was ejected into space and then part of it collapsed onto the atmosphere. The kinetic energy of the K comet, the explosion at very high altitude, the terrestrial ejecta, the electrostatic buildup and discharge, the interaction of the negatively charged coma and tail of the comet with the positively charged ionosphere of Earth caused our planet to lose part of its atmosphere, ejecting it into space.
There are some variations of this scenario. The comet fragment could be destroyed in the air, and the crater could have been made by the electric discharge. It is also possible that a large chunk from the exploded bolide survived, and that and the discharge made a huge crater or craters.
After the explosion, there was an ionized column between Earth and the ionosphere, which was like a gaseous electric cable between Earth’s surface and ionosphere through which powerful electrical discharges could last several minutes or longer.
The ionosphere is not that high. The ionosphere is a region of the upper atmosphere, from about 85 km (53 mi) to 600 km (370 mi) altitude.
Even if there was no airburst of the fragment that hit Earth and no electrical discharge between the cometary core and the surface, the comet caused a tremendous plasma column between the negatively charged Earth and the positively charged ionosphere, which could produce enormous electrical discharges and cause the planet to lose atmosphere.
If the fragment was large enough, it was possible that the electric discharges between the fragment and Earth’s surface to be more than one. It was also possible there was only one super-discharge between 10 km between the large cometary core and the surface. There were probably one, or several, airbursts high in the atmosphere and one impact.
With the increasing size of the fragment, they explode at a higher altitude. The K comet fragment was much larger than the Tunguska meteorite, and it should have exploded very high in the atmosphere; thus, the airburst significantly contributed to the loss of atmosphere. The ionosphere and the ozone layer were seriously disturbed and lost their protective qualities for a long time.
The cometary impact is much more devastating then an asteroid hitting the Earth: comets are faster, they have four times more kinetic energy, they are larger, there are multiple powerful electric discharges, part of the atmosphere could be lost, and it can darken the skies for a prolonged period of time, much longer than an asteroid can do, etc.
I think that the hypothesis of Vladimir Solyanik and Alexander Nevsky, plus my addition that the cometary coma also plays a significant role in the cometary impact events, is worth serious attention. There’s still certainly research that needs to be done. There is needed sophisticated computer simulations, experiments, high-tech labs, and additional research for this suggestion to be confirmed, refined, or discarded, partially or totally.
Researching the K comet theory, we should keep in mind the possibility of electric discharge and the significance of the cometary coma when explaining the mechanism of the K comet events.
Comet impacts and electric discharges can destroy life, but they also create life.
About 4 to 3.8 billion years ago there was a period of intense comet and asteroid bombardment, which had peppered all the planets, including the Earth. Many of the numerous craters found on the Moon and other bodies in the Solar System recorded this event.
The Late Heavy Bombardment was period of heightened meteorite activity that had important implications for life on Earth, since it coincides roughly with the time that scientists think the first primitive life forms appeared on our planet.
Early Earth was pounded by a steady stream of meteorites, some of them as large as 10 kilometers in diameter, for about 100 million years.
During the Bombardment, comets delivered large amount of water and organics. Part of these organics became more complex while they entered Earth’s atmosphere because of the powerful electric discharges of the impacting comets, thus providing precursors of life.
Championship of Species in Troubled Conditions
The K comet events were a major, devastating event, but we shouldn’t assume that Cretaceous species all over the world were immediately extinguished.
Some extinct species, including groups of dinosaurs, survived the impact, but the scarce food, lower levels of oxygen, the worsened environment, and the fierce competition finished them off.
Dust lingering for tens of thousands of years in the upper atmosphere before and after the cometary strikes, cooler climate, severely reduced plant mass, multiple impacts (mostly airbursts) of the disintegrating comet, reduced levels of oxygen, reduced air pressure, ozone layer depletion, numerous wildfires, huge tsunamis, changed chemistry of the oceans, massive volcanic activity and basalt floods, heavy acid rains, abrupt loss of atmosphere, etc., created the specific pattern of the Cretaceous extinction.
Peter Ward compares the K-Pg extinction event to an earthquake; even if you are not destroyed by the shaking itself, you may die later from lack of water, power, food, disease, or crime.
The highly stressed post-Cretaceous environment was a very tough playground for the species, fighting to survive and dominate.
Most of the species were not killed by the K-T event but after that, because of the highly worsened environment and fierce competition for food and territories. This after-the-shock period is part and parcel of the Cretaceous extinction.
Mammals were evolutionary higher animals and they became the dominant species on the planet ever since the K-Pg extinction.
The method of breeding gave the mammals the ultimate advantage over the egg-laying species.
Because of the extensive fossil record of extinct dinosaur eggs, eggshells, and embryos, it is well established that dinosaurs laid eggs.
The principal disadvantages of dinosaurian reproduction, compared to mammalian, are:
1. The nutrients inside the egg are very limited compared to the continuous supply that mammals receive inside the womb;
2. The oxygen supply is much lower as well;
3. The temperature of the reptile embryo is dependent upon the environment, while the body heat of the mammalian fetus is constant;
4. Dinosaur newborns don’t get the highly nutritious food that mammals do—milk;
5. Shorter gestation period. This is the time in which the fetus develops, beginning with fertilization and ending with birth. Eggs hatch between 60 and 105 days after they are laid. The human baby develops inside the mother’s womb for about 270 days. The human brain develops from three to four and a half times longer, and in a much better inner environment, than the dinosaurian brain.
The developing sophisticated brain needs more oxygen, more nutrients, a constant temperature, and more time.
The mammalian fetus, developing inside the maternal body, can receive a continuous and generous supply of oxygen and all the nutrients needed to build a complex brain. The milk of mammals contains essential nutrients, important antibodies, and white blood cells. This is a perfect food for infants and for their energy-hungry developing brains.
The brain of live-birth mammalian animals is evolutionarily higher than the brain of animals that reproduce through egg-hatching and it is also far more sophisticated.
Even warm-bloodedness does not help much toward intelligence, if one hatches from an egg. Avian dinosaurs (birds) compared to the primates are a typical example.
Mammals were evolutionarily better players and won the world dominance trophy by a single stroke, thanks to the K comet. The non-avian dinosaurs were simply too large and too Mesozoic to survive the Great end-Cretaceous Energy Filter.
The dinosaur extinction mechanism is finally revealed.
Humanity can survive a strike of the Devil’s Tail asteroid (Chicxulub is a Mayan word for “devil’s tail”), but it can’t survive catastrophic eventscaused by the K comet, the devil himself.
2. Asteroid
impact theory.
The asteroid story is simple.
A huge, rogue asteroid slammed into the Earth and destroyed the wonderful Mesozoic paradise, including the smart, cute dinosaurs that were on the brink of creating a dinosaurian civilization.
This is just the perfect story the people like to read so much in the academic and popular press.
“I would say 95 percent or more of the earth scientists who study the K-T boundary are in agreement that Chicxulub is the event that brought on the K-T mass extinctions,” said geophysicist Sean Gulick.
In their article “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,” Peter Schulte of the GeoZentrum Nordbayern and 40 colleagues from other universities and institutions, summarized:
“Paleontologists have long recognized the global scale and abruptness of the major biotic turnover at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg, formerly K-T) boundary ~65.5 million years ago (Ma). This boundary represents one of the most devastating events in the history of life and abruptly ended the age of the dinosaurs. Thirty years ago, the discovery of an anomalously high abundance of iridium and other platinum group elements (PGEs) in the K-Pg boundary clay led to the hypothesis that an asteroid ~10 km in diameter collided with Earth and rendered many environments uninhabitable.”
The asteroid impact extinction theory originated with the Alvarez team. They published it in 1980 in the article “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.”
The story of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs has become common knowledge for most people, so I will not retell you something you already know.
3. Impacts From Twin Asteroids.
Some scientists think that the Chicxulub asteroid was too small, with insufficient kinetic energy to cause a mass extinction. A binary asteroid impact could partially resolve this problem.
Dinosaur Killers Page 9
