Signs in the skies
Toolbox
By KENDALL WILD The Rutland Herald - Published: November 18, 2009
On a day (rare, these days) when there was bright sunlight and a cloudless sky, I was standing on my front lawn looking up at a couple of people working on my roof. Suddenly, as I was gazing up, there appeared the streak of a meteor overhead.
Such things are quite rare in the daytime. You have to be looking at the exact spot in the sky where the meteor enters, and the smoke trail fades very quickly. It was gone by the time the roofers looked up in response to my call. I'm not sure if they thought I had been seeing things that didn't exist.
The incident brought to mind last year's accounts of the asteroid that is going to come so close to the earth that it may hit us, and the efforts being talked about to divert it. It has been named "Apophis," after the Egyptian deity of destruction. In 2029 it will come close enough to be seen with the naked eye in daylight. In that year, according to what has been said, astronomers will be able to tell if it is on a track that will bring it crashing to earth in 2036. On that track it would come down somewhere in the South Pacific, according to what has been learned of its orbit.
It is too big to pulverize. While it is small by comparison to the planets, it's big enough to cause a great deal of damage. If it were in Rutland it would stretch from Wales Street to Meadow Street and from Keefe Gym to St. Peter's Field, with accompanying depth. Discussing the possibilities when the object was first determined, an astronomer said that breaking it into smaller boulders would only mean they would crash over a wider area, causing even more damage.
It would not be the first time a heavenly object has been big enough to strike the earth. About a century ago a meteor slammed into a Siberian forest, leveling trees for miles around. If it had come down in a populated area, it would have caused a major disaster. A big crater in Arizona was created by a meteor crunch thousands of years ago.
A few years back scientists determined that a meteor punched a hole in what is now the Caribbean off the coast of Yucatan in Mexico, and opined that it helped lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. And only this year the discovery of a meteor hole larger than that off Yucatan was announced as being off the west coast of India in the Indian Ocean. About 300,000 years separated the Caribbean from the Indian Ocean punching, but that is only a tick of time in the scale of earth's age.
It seems reasonable that some if not all of the geologic changes in the earth's history have come about by hits from objects big enough to cause major atmospheric changes or seismic activity, or a combination of both. Sometime in the past an asteroid as big as Mount Everest came down in an area that is now just north of Australia. Something that size could even change the rotation of the earth. That may help explain why there have been those changes that have been determined in the location of magnetic north, over the course of time.
In any event, while meteor showers are an interesting sight something as big as Apophis, especially if it hits us at a certain angle, could make us go the way of the dinosaurs. Let us hope a way is found to divert it and others like it. At least it is not likely that the dinosaurs were aware of asteroids before they hit. In that respect we have an advantage over them.
Kendall Wild is a retired editor of the Rutland Herald.
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