Russian Meteor

We're hit every day by asteroids. Something I have read before but I was reminded of again when reading this morning's story by Kenneth Chang about the 300-kiloton blast by a meteor that rocked Mother Russia Friday morning:

Within the emptiness of space, billions of rocks, from dust to those miles across, zip around the inner solar system, and collisions with the Earth’s atmosphere are frequent. 

Most are mere grains, burning up high in the atmosphere. Larger ones — the size of peas — can be spotted streaking across the night sky as “shooting stars,” but those also never reach the ground. 

“Small objects the size of a basketball hit the Earth almost every day, once a day on average, and car-size objects hit every month or two,” Dr. Chodas said. “Little stuff hits the Earth all the time. We just don’t know about it. It’s all burning up in the atmosphere.”

Scientists estimate that these tiny meteoritic bits add up to 80 tons of material falling on Earth from outer space each day.

Giant impacts have changed the course of life on Earth, notably 65 million years ago when an object several miles wide slammed off the coast of Mexico and killed off the dinosaurs. Collisions with objects the size of the Russian meteor or 2012DA14, the asteroid that did not hit Earth on Friday, occur perhaps once a century.

For several years I consumed a steady diet of dinosaur extinction books, most of which focused on the Alvarez hypothesis. At the time the Alvarez hypothesis was not the settled science that Kenneth Chang cites today. There was a school of thought favoring the volcanic eruptions that formed the Deccan Traps. The time frame is similar. But in 2010 a international panel of scientists concluded that an asteroid impact caused the demise of the dinosaurs, specifically the asteroid that created Chicxulub crater located on the Yucatan Peninsula.

I left New York City the summer of 1993. I had been living with my girlfriend Mary in her Brooklyn apartment and reading her significant collection of Scientific American magazines. It was in one of Mary's Scientific American magazines that I first read about the Alvarez hypothesis. Part of the reason I moved to San Antonio was to be close to -- in swooping distance of -- a possible huge impact crater in the Yucatan that would confirm the Alvarez hypothesis. Reports were appearing in the press. I think the first one I saw was a little Associated Press story. My fantasy was to get a motorcycle and ride to Cancun; then spend some time in English-speaking Belize. I would ascertain directly the location of the event that led to the rise of the mammals.

The fantasy would stay a fantasy, one that I used to entertain myself while waiting for the bus after work as a warehouseman for the Southern Engine & Pump Company.