Too Many Meteor Strikes in 6k Years

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Everytime I see a full moon and observe all those enormous
craters I think to myself how many times has that beautiful rock taken one for ol' Planet Earth and spared us a direct hit.

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This is a very good point. While the moon may have spared us those hits the earth almost certainly took many times more hits about 3.8 billion years ago when the moon took many of the those hits. The geological evidence has been lost on earth over billions of years but the earth must have really been pounded during the Lunar BombardmentRandy

Wow this thread has moved fast. I did a few calculations. First since the flood supposedly rearranged all the world's geology I don't think these meteor strikes can have left the craters we see if they were preflood. If they are post flood someone should have notices them. So maybe they happened during the flood year. It seems to me that they would have to be late in the flood year after much of the sedimentary record had been deposited or their crates would have been obliterated. So they are falling all around. Maybe this is after Noah landed but before all the water had receeded so all the massive waves wouldn't flip the ark over.If we take the Impact Database and the impact effect calculator We can divide the craters into groups and estimate their impact energies. I did this with 120 or so that are more than 4 km in diameter, to 60 that 4-10, 25 that are 10-20 and so on. I then calculated the impact energy based on the smallest crater size of each division to get a rough estimate that underestimates rather than overestimates the energy.What happens when these things hit in water? First they vaporize a massive amount of water putting steam in the air. Then they vaporize themselves and part of the earth's crust producing a massive heat and shock wave. The big ones will produce a fireball that will ignite wood 500 miles away. I calculate that the energy released is about 6 X 10^24 J equivalent to dropping about 1.5 billion 1 megaton H bombs. Thermal radiation, steam and vaporized rock are all efficient ways to transfer heat to the air. The earth's rate of heat loss by Black Body radiation won't be able to keep up and the atmosphere will heat up. The heat capacity of atmospheric gases is about 1 j/g-K and there are about 5 x 10^21 grams of gas. This means that enough heat is released to heat the entire atmosphere to 1000 degrees if it were all transfered to the atmosphere. Of course quite a bit of the energy will go into melting crustal rocks and into molten rock that falls back into the global oceans before giving up all its heat to the air. Still I think it would pretty thoroughly cook the earth to death.Now realize that what we see are craters from only a small fraction of the objects that hit earth over its history. As mentioned before just look at the moon. The earth would surely have received many more hits than the moon during the lunar bombardment, probably being hit by dozens if not hundreds of objects from 20 to 100 or more km in diameter and thousands of smaller ones vaporizing the oceans.Of course if the earth is 4.55 billion years old and there never was a global flood then this is no problem.Randy

The force will indeed be transmitted through the water making huges waves but some of the energy will be absorbed by the water vaporizing it and causing a huge "water crater" to form. This will make an even bigger wave as water flows in to fill the space vacated by the vaporizing water. water that was pushed away by the impact and whatever part of the ocean's crust is vaporized. A 5 km asteroid hitting at 17 km/sec is expected to open a "crater" in the water with a diameter of about 40 miles.http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/That will make a big wave when it refills.Randy

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Yes, well so many have said, and for all I know it's possible and would in fact be a big problem for an ark, but so far all anyone has done is assert that it's so without any attempt to explain to me the forces involved. Heck I can assert all kinds of things too as ought to be apparent by now, only at least I have some arguments for mine, so they aren't JUST assertions.

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Trixe pointed out the Impact calculator You can use it to get some idea of the forces invovled. A 10000 meter diameter rocky asteroid going 17 Km/sec would make a final crater of about 74 miles diameter. There are 6 about this size known on earth and 4 that are significantly bigger. Here are some effects both locally and at 500 miles distance."The crater opened in the water has a diameter of 114 km = 70.9 milesFor the crater formed in the seafloor:
Transient Crater Diameter: 68.4 km = 42.5 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 24.2 km = 15 milesFinal Crater Diameter: 119 km = 74 miles
Final Crater Depth: 1.25 km = 0.775 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 1850 km3 = 444 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 503 meters = 1650 feet
Thermal Radiation:
What does this mean?Time for maximum radiation: 7.18 seconds after impactVisible fireball radius: 71.8 km = 44.6 miles
The fireball appears 20.4 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 8.32 x 107 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 1580 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 52.5Effects of Thermal Radiation:Clothing ignitesMuch of the body suffers third degree burnsNewspaper ignitesPlywood flamesDeciduous trees igniteGrass ignitesSeismic Effects:
What does this mean?The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 160 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 9.8 (This is greater than any earthquake in recorded history)
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 800 km:IV. Felt indoors by many, outdoors by few during the day. At night, some awakened. Dishes, windows, doors disturbed; walls make cracking sound. Sensation like heavy truck striking building. Standing motor cars rocked noticeably.V. Felt by nearly everyone; many awakened. Some dishes, windows broken. Unstable objects overturned. Pendulum clocks may stop.Ejecta:
What does this mean?The ejecta will arrive approximately 434 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 38.2 cm = 15 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 3.28 mm = 0.129 inchesAir Blast:
What does this mean?The air blast will arrive at approximately 2420 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 142000 Pa = 1.42 bars = 20.2 psi
Max wind velocity: 225 m/s = 503 mph
Sound Intensity: 103 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.Highway truss bridges will collapse.Glass windows will shatter.Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.
"You will also find a link to a pdf file that explains how they do the calculations.Note that another factor of all these strikes is ejecta raining down all over the earth. So in addition to the rain from the flood there would be a rain of hot rocks. That would be just a little tough on a wooden boat and of course air temperatures would eventually pass those where life would survive anyway as I pointed out earlier.Now keep in mind that we only see the reminants of a tiny fraction of the objects that have impacted earth in its history. The rain of destruction during the lunar bombardment would probably have vaporized the oceans and melted a significant fraction of the earths crust.Added in edit: I used a water depth at the impact point of 1000 meters for the above calculation.
RandyThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-24-2005 08:09 AMThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-24-2005 08:10 AM

Thanks.
The main effect of really deep water is to reduce final crater size and reduce ejecta. Of course a lot more steam will be produced from vaporizing more water.Here we have a calculation with the same object hitting 10,000 meter deep water (about as deep as you could get at at 45 degree angle 500 miles away.The crater opened in the water has a diameter of 102 km = 63.1 milesFor the crater formed in the seafloor:
Transient Crater Diameter: 47.3 km = 29.4 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 16.7 km = 10.4 milesFinal Crater Diameter: 78.5 km = 48.8 miles
Final Crater Depth: 1.1 km = 0.683 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 413 km3 = 99 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 235 meters = 771 feet
Thermal Radiation:Time for maximum radiation: 7.18 seconds after impactVisible fireball radius: 71.8 km = 44.6 miles
The fireball appears 20.4 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 8.31 x 107 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 1580 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 52.4Effects of Thermal Radiation:Clothing ignitesMuch of the body suffers third degree burnsNewspaper ignitesPlywood flamesDeciduous trees igniteGrass ignitesSeismic Effects:The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 160 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 9.4
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 800 km:Ejecta:The ejecta will arrive approximately 434 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 8.72 cm = 3.43 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 2.13 mm = 0.0839 inchesAir Blast:The air blast will arrive at approximately 2420 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 142000 Pa = 1.42 bars = 20.2 psi
Max wind velocity: 225 m/s = 503 mph
Sound Intensity: 103 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Highway truss bridges will collapse.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.Of course a wave a few thousand feet high will also form.Added in edit. Even the impacts that produced the dozens of craters between 5 and 50 km in diameter would have produced blast winds over 100 mph for long distances as you can see if you play around with the calculations.RandyThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-24-2005 10:56 AMThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-24-2005 10:57 AM

No meteorite in historic times has left a crater 10's to 100's of kilometers wide and yet there are many such found on earth.

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3) SHIPS AT SEA DO NOT NORMALLY EVEN NOTICE A PASSING TSUNAMI. This is the most important information to answer those who claimed the effects would be devastating to Noah's ark. The ark was a huge ship by the way. 450' x 75' x 45' with three stories.

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We are talking about a very different kind of wave here. Did you look at what I posted above. An asteroid 10 km in diameter hitting the ocean would create a transient hole in the ocean about 70 mile in diameter all the way to the now molten ocean floor. That is going to make waves thousands of feet high, not a ripple hardly noticed by passing ships. Then there is the blast. An asteroid the size of the one that created the Vredefort impact in South Africa would create a blast wind of 200 mph 3,000 miles from the impact site. Then there is ejecta. Hot ash would rain down over wide areas around the impact site. Then there is the heat released from the kinetic energy in all these impacts which I calculated in post 85. All of these objects raining down on earth during the "flood year" would release 10 times more energy than that required to heat the atmosphere to 200 degrees F. We are not talking about a "normal" tsunami here as I pointed out above.Now consider if you dare what must have happened to earth when the moon and the rest of the inner solar system were being bombarded during the lunar bombardment I have mentioned before.

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The Arizona University researchers said at least 17,000 impacts would have occurred on earth at the time of the moon bombardment. "The largest of these probably produced an immense amount of ejecta, temporarily changed the atmosphere and boiled away large quantities of surface water." It coincides with the earliest evidence of life on earth.

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(bold added)What see remaining on earth are the scars from a tiny fraction of the impacts that must have occured during the history of the planet as analysis of the moon makes clear.There was simply no way for complex life on earth to have survived the asteroid storm that created the lunar bombardment even if it was spread over a few million years, let alone crammed into either preflood times or the "flood year" in the YEC model.Randy

The guys estimate that even a relatively small impactor just 1 km in diameter would make a wave a thousand meters high.Sthjournal.orgHowever, wave height is inversely proportional to distance and since the radiant heat and air blast travel faster it seems to me more likely that the ark would be blown to bits or burned to a crisp before it was rolled over by the water wave from the blast.
Randy

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I thought it was brought up to impress me with what a devastating effect such an event would have had on Noah and company. Now it turns out it's a big nothing.

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Even all the nuclear testing that was done above ground in the fifties didn't produce half the results we might expect. The effects were surprisingly local, or traceable by wind patterns, devastating to downwinders but nevertheless confined to that area, without the worldwide atmospheric effect some talked about. I would never want to minimize those tests, including the effects of the underground testing afterward, but the fact is there were 100 atmospheric (and 828 underground) bombs tested in a short period of time just at the one Nevada Test Site, the atmospheric ones all within the 50s, all in one location, and their effect seems to have been a lot less than dramatic.

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Any one of them COULD wipe out a city, or do a lot of damage, but if these meteors hit in uninhabited places or underwater in a worldwide flood, nobody's yet convinced me they'd do anything like you predict.

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I know this was an older post as some pictures and calculations have been presented since but I wonder if you really have any comprehension of the energy released by these impacts. The Chixulub impact is estimated at around 100 million megatons of TNT. The Hiroshima bomb was about 20 kilotons. Thus the Chixulub impact released energy equivalent to about 5 billion Hiroshima bombs.The Sudbury and Vredefort impacts were bigger. I estimate they each released energy equivalent about 10-15 Billion Hiroshima A-Bombs so your analogy to nuclear testing doesn't mean much. If one looks at the impact database one can see that there were 6 impacts that were equivalent to 1 billion A-Bombs, 10 that were equivalent to about 400 million, 15 that were equivalent to about 100-200 million, 25 that were equivalent to 50-80 million and 60 that ranged from about 2 to 10 million A bombs in energy released.If you want to claim that these things rained down on the earth during the "flood year" you better have a really tough ark. Each of these impacts will produce enormous volumes of steam, filling the air with steam and molten rock. Blast waves in the air and massive waves in the water will spread from hundreds to thousands of kilometers from each impact. Ejecta will rain hot rock and ash all over the surface of the heaving global ocean. Massive fireballs will heat the atmosphere. The steam from vaporized water will condense in the air releasing its latent heat of vaporization almost certainly heating the atmosphere well above the temperature that air breathing life can survive and falling as scalding hot rain.It's one thing to have such an impact every few hundred million years. It's quite another to cram them into a young earth and really impossible to cram them into a "flood year".Now as I said before look at the moon. It is estimated that during the heavy bombardment of the moon 17-22 thousand objects ranging in size from 10 (Chixulub size) to 100 km in diameter would have rained down on earth. This is an unavoidable conclusion because of the craters on the moon and earth's much more massive gravity as has been pointed out. This would have vaporized the oceans and destroyed all life on the surface of the earth.
lunar bombardment
Even the tiny fraction of impacts that left craters that have survived to the present day would have destroyed the ark if they fell during the flood year and those that hit the earth during the bombardment of the inner solar system must have sterilized the surface of the planet if any life was around at the time only extreme thermophilic bacteria might have survived.
Randy

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Sorry... I'm off topic. You guys are talking about rocks a couple of kilometers across, which have a different dynamic. They are not slowed by the atmosphere, and hit the ground at enormous velocity. That impact is what generates all the heat.

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Right. It is mostly the rapid compression of the target by the impacting object that transfers kinetic energy into heat. This is what makes the fireball. If you want to look at equations used for the
Impact Calculator You can find them Here In a pdf file.Added in Edit: It's not the fall that kills everything. It's the sudden stop at the bottom.RandyThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-25-2005 09:08 PM

Landing in deep water, especially at an oblique angle will reduce ejecta but it puts lots of steam into the atmosphere. You are missing the point. The steam goes into the atmosphere radiating heat in all directions. For the steam to condense and fall as rain it must release its latent heat of vaporization. Each gram of water that condenses will release enough heat to heat 333 grams of air by one degree. We aren’t burned to a crisp and Noah’s ark didn’t get parboiled because the impacts that left the craters we see were spread out over 2 billion years and those that occurred during the heavy lunar bombardment were 3.6-4 billion ago. If these hits were scatter over the next 2 or 3 millennia after the flood don’t you think someone would have noticed at least some of them? Not with so many hitting in such a short time. When the Vredefort strike occurred 2 billion years ago there was no air breathing life to incinerate but even then it would not have. It is not any single one that would cook everything, it is cramming them all into a short time frame. Of course there would have been impacts that would have cooked nearly all life if there had been life during the heavy lunar bombardment. During the lunar bombardment there was no complex life. When the Vredefort object hit in South Africa there was no air breathing life. Again, it is not any one of known strikes that is the problem but cramming them into a short time frame. Look at the moon. How do you think all those craters got there? There are 1,700 more that 20 km in diameter and the largest, the South Pole Atkins basin crater is 1,300 miles in diameter. How would the earth have escaped a massive bombardment when al this happened? The earth has 81 times more mass and thus gravitational attraction than the moon. It could not have escaped a massive bombardment even if you don’t dare to believe it. Have you been paying attention? Look at the earth impact database again and then consider the energies again. We are talking about more than 100 strikes that left craters of 4 km or more in diameter with energies ranging from a million times the Hiroshima Bomb to billions of times the energy of the A-Bomb.If start putting them after the flood then you have to explain why no one noticed their effects which at least in the case of the 15 largest would have had worldwide effects.Randy

There was a PangeaIt started breaking up about 220 million years ago. If it broke up after the flood and the continents moved to their current positions in a few thousand years the new seafloor and lithosphere that would have formed would have cooked the earth to death many times over before cooling to their present temperatures but that is not the point of this thread. In any case if you look at the map you will see that what is now the middle east was near the global ocean and not in the middle of Pangea. There was a global ocean but it was long ago and it didn't cover Pangea. Why make guesses about something that clearly never happened? The "dust" we are taling is melted and fragment asteroid and crustal material that is blown into the atmosphere on impact. Are you back to saying that most of them happened during the "flood year"? Otherwise the larger ones would surely have been noticed by the "post flood" people who did keep a lot of written records after all and meteorite "dust" should be found by archeologists. Oh, now you are back to having them after the flood. So there would have been no global ocean or rainy atmosphere to keep the "dust" down and it should have been noticed and we should find it. So which is it?Randy

I did this on an earlier thread. He would have had to have been a very big distance from some of the hits and there were a lot of hits. Some pretty big ones in Libya actually.When you look at the impact distribution map you see certain things.
1. No craters are known in the oceans.
2. Few craters in areas of active mountain building
3. No craters in Antarctica
4. Few in jungle areas such as the Amazon BasinThere is no reason that these areas should have been spared. There must have been many more craters that either have not been found or that have been obliterated by geologic processes. When do you think the flood was? There were some fairly advanced civilizations in the Middle East, India and China by 2000 BC., 2500 BC in Egypt and Summeria. Its strange that they didn’t notice any of this. The evidence has been lost on earth because of geologic processes such as plate tectonics and erosion. The oldest sea floor is only 200 million years old and there is very little really ancient continental crust.Interestingly even YEC astronomers seem to accept the lunar bombardment, as this article in CRSQ makes clear. They just don’t acknowledge that it would have sterilized the earth. We know certain things.There are many craters on earth
Some of these impacts had tremendous energy
There must have been many more that have not been found or were obliterated by geologic processes
The moon suffered a heavy bombardment. The earth with its much stronger gravitational field would have suffered and even heavier bombardment (or do you think Newton’s law of universal gravitation is only hypothetical
Either the early bombardment or the bombardment since then would have wiped out a 600 year old man in a big wooden boat full of animals if he had been floating around on a global ocean during even a fraction of the rain of destruction from the skies.
Randy

Right the craters that are visible must represent only a fraction of total impacts or the surface of the earth or it would look like the moon. Many of the craters on the moon were made more than 3.5 billion years ago and things have changed a lot since then on earth as I pointed out just above. The oldest surviving crater on earth is Vredefort which is 2 billion years old but it is the only one over a billion and there are very few that have survived more than 100 million years and of course any that fell in the oceans even recently would not have left a record and the surface area of the oceans is much higher than the exposed land. (Added in edit: By recently I mean in the last hundred million years or so: We would have noticed if a really big one had hit in the last few millennia. )RandyThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-27-2005 05:29 PM

A good point but I think it's off topic here unless you think we should caculate the effects of asteroid strikes through 8,000 meters of water and I actually did that at one point. The problem is that there are so many problems with the global flood that its hard to stay on track sometimes. Don't we have a "where did the water come frome thread" somewhere?RandyThis message has been edited by Randy, 05-27-2005 04:34 PM

That would explain the relative paucity of craters known in the Amazon basin and parts of Africa for sure. I suspect that there are many more to be discovered in some places but in other places with a lot of geological activity there were certainly past craters that have been wiped out maybe only leaving some shocked minerals behind if that.Randy