[meteorite-list] Comet impact!

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 6 10:04:00 2006
Message-ID: <2fa.2644777.3166085d_at_aol.com>

Eric O. wrote:

Hola Eric,

Those are good thoughts for perspective... agreed, but add to the
perspective, it is enough water to fill 704.2 million cans of Coke (assuming those are
metric tons which is about 10% than you figured, and nearly a mini tsunami of
207 feet x 207 feet x 207 feet vs. the 200 you also got.

It is also enough to provide enough to drink for every man, woman and child
in the USA for one full day.

A bit, when you consider the small comet was bopped with a solid impactor
much less than the size of a washing machine...wonder how many clothes that cube
would wash? All of New York City's for a day or two?

And if instead of dealing with liquid water, suppose we looked at the vapor
in the clouds and up a column in the atmosphere. This is the Hydrometeor
profile, i.e., if you took a column say one kilometer square at the base and
extended it from land (or sea) to the end of the atmosphere, do you know how much
water is in that if all the water were condensed to liquid and leveled on the
surface at standard conditions? A one kilometer monument built to the heavens,
is measured by the TRMM satellite programs, but I can't hand the data to know
how much, though it would be interesting to know how much water is in the
clouds...!

http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/datapool/TRMM/01_Data_Products/01_Orbital/0
5_Tmi_Prof_2A_12/

And enough, speaking of clouds, when you consider there are supposedly mind
boggling numbers of these comets in the Oort Cloud.

Saludos, Doug



<< Dave Harris wrote:
 
 <Amazing to see that the copper target that clouted the Comet Tempel 1
 kicked out 250,000 tons of water when it collided!
 There a great lot of info on the Web on this, but I wonder how this fits in
 with how there's so much water on Earth....was it transported via cometary
 collisions or the product of chemical reactions (or both, indeed!)?>
 
 250,000 tons of water sounds like a lot, but to put it into perspective it
would fill a:
 
 cube 200.08 feet on a side
 football field including endzones to a height of 138.9 feet
 official soccer field max size 360x240 feet to a height of 92.6 feet
 cylinder radius 200 feet would have a height of 63.7 feet
 cylinder radius 300 feet would have a height of just 8.6 feet
 cone radius 300 feet would have a height of 85 feet
 
     If you say a cone roughly approximates a crater shape and the comet is
half water half other stuff by volume then a cone radius 300 feet would need a
depth of 170 feet to accommodate 250000 tons of water. That is a big hole,
but still smaller than most people would image when they think of 250,000 tons
of water.
 
 --
 Eric Olson >>
Received on Thu 06 Apr 2006 01:59:57 AM PDT