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Published
Friday, March 13, 2020
Clearly, some situations are outside human control By James Brodell At the very least the coronavirus scare is injecting a dose of humility and a dash of realism into millions of Costa Ricans and Americans. Several generations of Costa Ricans and North Americans have led very comfortable lives. Many times the national governments are there to provide support, perhaps with low-cost health services or even welfare or unemployment payments. Diseases that ravaged the tropics and the world have been controlled with medical breakthroughs. Only the elderly can remember world wars, the Great Depression or the dreaded polio. So it comes as a shock to many that not every situation can be controlled to their advantage. Coronavirus is pretty scary, in part because there are so many unknown aspects. Still things could be much, much worse. Consider the fate of what scientists think was one of the first human agricultural civilizations. The University of California - Santa Barbara reported last week on a disaster perhaps 12,500 years ago at the town of Abu Hureyra in what is now Syria. Found among the cereals and grains and splashed on early building material and animal bones was meltglass, some features of which suggest it was formed at extremely high temperatures — far higher than what humans could achieve at the time — or that could be attributed to fire, lighting or volcanism, the university said. “To help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute,” said James Kennett, an emeritus professor of geology there who was quoted in a news report. Such intensity, he added, could only have resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy, high-velocity phenomenon, something on the order of a cosmic impact. In other words, Kennett and his colleagues think that a comet broke up and riddled the land with flame and destruction. The event also changed world history because it threw the earth into a mini-ice age called the Younger Dryas after a sub-Arctic plant that flourished at that time. Abu Hureyra is the first site to document the direct effects of a fragmented comet on a human settlement, said the university. These fragments are all part of the same comet that likely slammed into Earth and exploded in the atmosphere at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, according to Kennett. This impact contributed to the extinction of most large animals, including mammoths and American horses and camels, the disappearance of the North American Clovis culture and to the abrupt onset of the end glacial Younger Dryas cooling episode. The team’s findings are highlighted in a paper published in the Nature Journal Scientific Reports. The evidence for the devastation is a soil layer black with carbon from burned vegetation that can be found in many parts of the world. Some scientists think that another part of the comet slammed into North America or perhaps created two gigantic craters just discovered under the ice in Greenland. The findings put new meaning to the biblical warning in Proverbs 19:21, now translated into the idiom “Man proposes, but God disposes.” A comet or meteor disaster might be considered rare, but when one does happen, the results can be dramatic. Just ask the dinosaurs who scientists believe were wiped out by a meteor that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in México 65 million years ago. In 2006 a team of scientists disclosed the existence of a giant crater that has been hidden under the Indian Ocean. Named the Burckle crater after one of the scientists, the depression is more than 18 miles wide. The researchers estimate that a meteor or comet a mile in diameter hit the earth there traveling at 20 miles per second. The subsequent tsunami left traces that have been found along Africa and Australia. And the team estimates that this may have taken place just 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. The Burckle impact must have had an effect on civilization equivalent to the explosion of the Thira Volcano that obliterated much of the coastal civilizations around Greece and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean about 3,600 years ago In 2013 residents of the Chelyabinsk Oblast in south central Russia got a taste of a celestial visit when an estimated 66-foot meteor exploded in the air about 18.5 miles high. The blast released energy estimated to be from 26 to 33 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, but the bulk of the energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, earth's protective shield. Still, 1,500 persons suffered injuries and thousands of buildings sustained damage. Another air burst appears to have happened in a remote Russian Siberian forest along the Tunguska River in 1906. Russian scientists estimate that 80 million trees were flattened and at least three persons may have died. That rock may have had a diameter as much as 620 feet. In all but the inaccessible Burckle crater that is deep under water and the frozen Greenland sites, researchers have found debris that could have formed only with the help of a meteor or comet. This includes nanodiamonds, high concentrations of platinum and tiny metallic spherules formed at very high temperatures. Similar material has been found at Pilauco Bajo in southern Chile. Costa Rica is well within the debris field that has been mapped in the Americas and Europe that shows the carbon soil layer. “The critical materials are extremely rare under normal temperatures, but are commonly found during impact events,” Kennett was quoted as saying. According to his study, the meltglass was formed “from the nearly instantaneous melting and vaporization of regional biomass, soils and floodplain deposits, followed by instantaneous cooling.” Additionally, because the materials found are consistent with those found in the Younger Dryas layers at the other sites across the world, it is likely that they resulted from a fragmented comet, as opposed to impacts caused by individual comets or asteroids, according to the university. “A single major asteroid impact would not have caused such widely scattered materials like those discovered at Abu Hureyra,” Kennett said. “The largest cometary debris clusters are proposed to be capable of causing thousands of air bursts within a span of minutes across one entire hemisphere of Earth.” Other scientists have said the comet cluster changed ocean circulation, caused a 1,100-year-long cooling of the climate and wiped out half of the human population at the time. After the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 1994, scientists began tracking asteroids and comets that might hit the earth. Now that job in the U.S. is with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There also are other national agencies elsewhere in the world, universities and also private volunteers studying the night sky daily. Even if a potentially dangerous asteroid is spotted, there is no consensus on what to do to deflect it. So far, the Campo Imperatore Near-Earth Object Survey, based near Rome, Italy, has catalogued 19,470 nearby asteroids and nearly 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous. ------------------ Editor's note: Mr. Brodell, founder and long-time editor of A.M. Costa Rica, can be reached at: jay@amcostarica.com |
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