[meteorite-list] NPA 07-04-1980 Tektite Ring Made Cold Winter, John O'Keefe
From: MARK BOSTICK <thebigcollector_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue May 17 17:01:54 2005 Message-ID: <BAY104-F53F8E26998CCA91B38D77B3160_at_phx.gbl> Paper: Chronicle-Telegram City: Elyria, Ohio Date: Friday, July 4, 1980 Page: B-3 Cosmic ring made winters colder? WASHINGTON (UPI) - Something happened 34 million years ago to send winter temperatures plummeting around the world for at least a million years while summer temperatures experienced little change. The sudden onslaught of severe winters - an average 15 degrees Fahrenheit colder by one estimate - amounted to a ecological disaster for forest planets and one-celled sea animals called Radiolaria. Dr. John A. O'Keefe, an astronomer at the space agency's Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, Md., suggest the shadow of a ring of cosmic glass pieces around the Earth was responsible for the sudden winter cooling. O'KEEFE FINDS the evidence for such a debris ring in a belt of small glassy globules called tektites found strewn across North America to the Philippines and Indian Ocean Islands. The origin of tektites is poorly understood but scientists generally believe they came from space. Because of the similarities with moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts, O'Keefe thinks tektites may have come from a lunar eruption. The North American tektites have been dating as having formed 34 million years ago. Recent studies of microscopic fossils by Dr. B. P. Glass of the University of Delaware show that five abundance species of Radiolaria disappeared within a few tens of thousands of years of the appearance of the tektites. IN ADDITION to the tektites that fell on the Earth, O'Keefe suggest many others missed the planet and were captured by gravity into orbits around the globe. There first would be cloud of such cosmic debris around the Earth but the particles would quickly collapse to form a ring like those circling the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus. "If there is a connection between tektites and climatic change, then it probably results from the screening of sunlight," O'Keefe said in a report in a recent issue of the British scientific journal, Nature. Any debris ring would form directly above the equator and thus it would cut off sunlight in the winter months of the Northern Hemisphere, but not in the summer, O'Keefe said. THE SHADOW cast by the ring would lower winter temperatures. O'Keefe believes the ring disappeared when forces such as the pressure of sunlight or the drag or the very thin upper atmosphere pulled particles out of the ring. He calculates such a tektite ring would last a few million years. Adding support to the theory, O'Keefe said in an interview, is a similar correlation of another field of tektites and sudden changes to Radiolaria 600,000 years ago. (end) Clear Skies, Mark Bostick Wichita, Kansas http://www.meteoritearticles.com http://www.kansasmeteoritesociety.com http://www.imca.cc http://stores.ebay.com/meteoritearticles PDF copy of this article, and most I post (and about 1/2 of those on my website), is available upon e-mail request. The NPA in the subject line, stands for Newspaper Article. The old list server allowed us a search feature the current does not, so I guess this is more for quick reference and shortening the subject line now. Received on Tue 17 May 2005 05:01:51 PM PDT |
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