8.5 Cosmic influences on the evolution of earth  (Page 2/26)

Despite this violence, no craters were formed by the Tunguska explosion. Shattered by atmospheric pressure, the stony projectile with a mass of approximately 10,000 tons disintegrated above our planet’s surface to create a blast equivalent to a 5-megaton nuclear bomb. Had it been smaller or more fragile, the impacting body would have dissipated its energy at high altitude and probably attracted no attention. Today, such high-altitude atmospheric explosions are monitored regularly by military surveillance systems.

If it had been larger or made of stronger material (such as metal), the Tunguska projectile would have penetrated all the way to the surface of Earth and exploded to form a crater. Instead, only the heat and shock of the atmospheric explosion reached the surface, but the devastation it left behind in Siberia bore witness to the power of such impacts. Imagine if the same rocky impactor had exploded over New York City in 1908; history books might today record it as one of the most deadly events in human history.

Tens of thousands of people witnessed directly the explosion of a smaller (20-meter) projectile over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on an early winter morning in 2013. It exploded at a height of 21 kilometers in a burst of light brighter than the Sun, and the shockwave of the 0.5-megaton explosion broke tens of thousands of windows and sent hundreds of people to the hospital. Rock fragments (meteorites) were easily collected by people in the area after the blast because they landed on fresh snow.

The best-known recent crater on Earth was formed about 50,000 years ago in Arizona. The projectile in this case was a lump of iron about 40 meters in diameter. Now called Meteor Crater and a major tourist attraction on the way to the Grand Canyon, the crater is about a mile across and has all the features associated with similar-size lunar impact craters ( [link] ). Meteor Crater is one of the few impact features on Earth that remains relatively intact; some older craters are so eroded that only a trained eye can distinguish them. Nevertheless, more than 150 have been identified. (See the list of suggested online sites at the end of this chapter if you want to find out more about these other impact scars.)

Meteor crater in arizona.

Mass extinction

The impact that produced Meteor Crater would have been dramatic indeed to any humans who witnessed it (from a safe distance) since the energy release was equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb. But such explosions are devastating only in their local areas; they have no global consequences. Much larger (and rarer) impacts, however, can disturb the ecological balance of the entire planet and thus influence the course of evolution.