Earth - Craters

[Vicomt]

Hi all, I've been reading for a while, trying to expand my knowledge whilst retaining sanity about the various illogical things scientists tell me these days. Anyway, I just noticed the following story http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/26 ... te_impact/, which contains the following quote...

"Chemical testing of the rocks found the characteristic signature of meteoritic material, which has high levels of the key element iridium, normally only found in low concentrations in surface rocks on Earth. We found more evidence when we examined the rocks under a microscope; tell-tale microscopic parallel fractures that also imply a meteorite strike."

now what I'm wondering is.... is this assumption is correct? Is there any other way to account for iridum via EU theories?

looking forward to learning.

Vicomt

[Vicomt]

Meh, that was me... I am actually registered and was logged in, but this site and Opera don't seem to want to remember that fact

Vicomt

[klypp]

I'm also new to this forum and EU. I have been checking in here a few days now hoping to see an answer to your question. However, it seems rather silent here, so I guess I'll have to add some thoughts myself.

The news article you're referring to is based on an article in GSA Journal. A resume can be found here:
http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?re ... FG24454A.1

I noted the following quote: "However, shocked quartz and biotite provide evidence for high-pressure shock metamorphism, while chromium isotope values and elevated abundances of platinum group metals and siderophile elements indicate addition of meteoritic material."
What they're actually saying is that iridium ("platinum group metals") must come from space ("addition of meteoritic material"). Why? I guess it is, as every Big Banger would tell you: Only supernovas can produce elements heavier than iron.

There is however a few (all too familiar!) problems with this theory:
1. Observations indicate something else is going on:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-Heav ... 1366.shtml
2. Experiments tell a somewhat different story. All known elements heavier than uranium is produced in laboratories, with the exception of two: einsteinium and fermium. They were "unexpectedly" found in the debris of a nuclear explosion!
http://www.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/08/0.html
Quite a number of heavy elements produced! And would you believe - the author of this article still insists that everything heavier than iron is produced by supernovas!

So what about EU and thunderbolts? So far I haven't found much. But there is an interesting article on this site, stating that "more than 99 percent of the global iridium layer is made up of spherules--droplets that condensed from vaporized rock." ( http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/ ... crater.htm ).

Even if there are some clear indications here, I feel there should be more to be said. So what about it, does iridium come from outer space or is it produced by the thunderbolt itself? Anyone?

Where is the electrician when you need one?

[bboyer]

<snip>
Where is the electrician when you need one?

At Dunkin' Donuts with the local beat cop?

I guess this is a timely topic in that I have a recovered thread I've been meaning to get around reposting about transmutation (thread title Transmutation on Stars, Planets etc). It'll be reposted in the Electric Universe section of the board. May or may not provide any satisfactory information for you since I don't believe it specifically addresses iridium, but hopefully you'll at least find it interesting and in context.

bryan

EDIT: thread has been reposted at above url

[Solar]

Transmutation @ TOPD

"Between 1910 and 1930, many experimenters (some extremely well respected) reported the mysterious appearance of hydrogen, helium and neon in electrical discharge tubes.1 E.C.C. Baly, a Fellow of the Royal Society, summarized pertinent results in the Annual Reports of the Chemical Society for 1924 (pages 41 to 47) and 1920 (pages 27 to 35). He published results of his own experiments with R.W. Riding in 1925 and 1926. They concluded that nitrogen atoms had been converted into helium and neon during their high voltage electrical discharge experiments.
On February 13, 1914, Professor J. Norman Collie, Fellow of the Royal Society, presented a speech1 to the society. He described several experiments he performed and those reported by others in which hydrogen, helium and neon gases mysteriously appeared in electrical discharge tubes." - Paul Rowe "Controlled Transmutation of Elements Under Surprisingly Mild Conditions? via Hasselburger

[klypp]

Ouch! A lot of interesting stuff in the reposted thread, some even giving new meaning to the words "nuclear plant".

So where does this leave us? Seems like we can make everything below iron and everything above uranium. But we still need a supernova for iridium - if we can find one willing to do what it should do...
While we're waiting for the right one to come around, I thought I would check out those comets a bit more. How much iridium should I expect a comet to bring in on a regular flight to Scotland?
Dr. Jeremy Tatum, professor of physics and astronomy, has done research on molecular spectroscopy, the composition of comets, and the orbits of asteroids for more than 30 years. He even got an asteroid named for him. Here's what he said:

The presence or absence of iridium in the K/T boundary layer or in volcanic
magmas tells us nothing whatever about whether or not a comet may at some
time have collided with Earth, for the following reasons.

1. Iridium has never been detected in the spectrum of any comet.

2. You would not expect to detect iridium in the spectrum of a comet
since iridium is a highly refractory element which could be vaporized
and its emission spectrum excited when the comet is so close to the Sun
(i.e. in the daytime sky) so that a spectrum cannot be obtained.

3. Even if iridium were detected in a cometary spectrum, this would not
enable us to determine how much iridium was in the comet because the
necessary oscillator strengths of the relevant lines have not been
determined in the laboratory.

As a consequence of this, it is not known by cometary scientists whether
iridium does or does not occur in comets, or, if it does, how much.

Iridium may be present in meteorites, but, as far as I know, it has never
been detected or identified in an asteroid, although presumably the
gamma-ray spectrometer aboard NEAR-Shoemaker has the capability of doing so
now.

It is high time that a brake was put on the highly speculative scenari about
the early history of the solar system that are being published on an almost
daily basis with little or no foundation of scientific fact or
understanding.

http://www.meteorobs.org/maillist/msg21003.html

I have to add that I am not sure if NEAR-Shoemaker really had the ability to find iridium on Eros. Anyway, it found lots of stuff, but no iridium.

No iridium in comets. And no iridium in asteroides, the supposed mothers of meteorites!
What now? If a comet didn't kill the dinosaurs, who did? Or...

Hope that electrician can finish off his donuts soon and come around to show me what a thunderbolt can do.
And he might as well bring along that cop too. Because something needs to be done about all these dinosaurs invading my garden now!!!

[webolife]

Thank you Klypp, for the great Tatum quote.
I've been researching the iridium question as well, coming up with only dogma, although the further back you go to the original Alvarez articles, the more iffy writers speak concerning iridium. I guess that's "conventional wisdom " for you. If no one argues about my speculation, and I say it loudly and longly enough, then I guess it becomes virtual fact by default. I've been noticing dinosaurs in my garden also! Maybe global warming is bringing them out?

[Solar]

From David Morrison: The "Responsible NASA Official"

"Two new papers make extraordinary claims about comets and life."

The Hypothesis went thus:

The scientific team visited more than a dozen archaeological sites in North America , where they found high concentrations of iridium, an element that is rare on Earth and is almost exclusively associated with extraterrestrial objects such as comets and meteorites.

"2. DID AN EXPLODING COMET KILL NORTH AMERICAN MEGAFAUNA AT END OF LAST ICE AGE?"

David Morrison's Critique wet thus:

CRITIQUE

This hypothesis of a recent comet impact is based on indications of extraterrestrial chemical signatures (such as iridium and metallic microspherules) found at more than a dozen archaeological sites in North America . But the proposed interpretation involving impact from a large comet is both internally inconsistent and is at odds with geological evidence.

The posted report suggests an impact on North America about 13,000 years ago by a 4-km-diameter comet. Something that large would not have been slowed significantly by its passage through the atmosphere. The explosion of roughly 10 million megatons would thus have made a crater at least 50 km across. Such a large crater formed on land this recently would be the most obvious impact feature on the planet. Yet it is not there, and one can't just wish it out of existence. The ejecta should also be obvious, yet that too is not found.

Impact by a 4-km comet or asteroid is extremely rare: for an asteroid the average interval is about once per 10 million years, for a comet as much as once per billion years. Yet this event is supposed to have happened 12,900 years ago. Normally in science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of evidence.

Added note: Several colleagues have informed me that these authors seem to be describing a comet that broke apart before impact, either fragmenting in the atmosphere or perhaps suffering a fate similar to that of Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9, which was pulled apart by the tidal forces of Jupiter. However, these suggestions do not save the hypothesis; quite the contrary. Calculations show that neither a stony object nor an icy comet will fragment in the atmosphere if it is several kilometers in diameter. And even if it did break apart at an elevation of (say) 100 km, this is only a few seconds before impact, so the material cannot spread very far laterally - perhaps of order 100 km, not the several thousand km that would be needed to distribute the impact over much of North America. The alternative, that the comet was pulled apart by tidal forces, would have required that it pass extremely close to the Moon on its way to hitting the Earth. Any impact by a 4-km comet or asteroid is extremely unlikely to have happened so recently, as noted in the critique above. To require that it also skim the surface of the Moon before hitting Earth drops the probability by several more factors of ten. In fact, such a comet break-up scenario for Earth is not likely to have happened even once in the past 4 billion years, let alone just 13,000 years ago. Yet another suggestion is that the widespread archeological evidence might have been due to secondary craters. But one only gets secondary craters if there is a primary crater, and as noted above, there is none.

[bboyer]

Did run across this tidbit [emphasis added]:

<snip>
Extinctions always seem to coincide with both continental flood basalts and imagined “meteorite impacts”. But under the prevailing interpretation, the odds of these happening simultaneously are vanishingly small. The electrical origin of the Chicxulub crater and surrounding geology resolves all of the contradictions in the evidence. A stupendous cosmic thunderbolt, occurring in a phase of widespread electric discharging, perhaps lasting millennia, could well have produced features similar to those carved on the surface of Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The primary crater-producing discharge could have excised the rock inside the crater and left a central peak without shattering the underlying rock. The electrical current, lasting longer than the forces of an impact, would have melted large amounts of material and formed vast clouds of spherules, a key signature of electrical discharge.

Indeed, more than 99 percent of the global iridium layer is made up of spherules--droplets that condensed from vaporized rock. Only the remaining 1 percent of the debris consisted of rock pulverized directly into dust. The spherule-producing ability of discharges has been demonstrated in lab experiments. Also, the electromagnetic pinch effect in a discharge channel can generate extremely large pressures, sufficient to shock quartz crystals. The axial acceleration of the discharge will pull debris away from the surface and high into the atmosphere, even into space, and the fallout of unsorted material will be influenced more by electrical and near-space factors than by lower atmospheric circulation.

In the impact model, the size of the crater depends only upon the mechanical energy of the impactor, that is, its mass and speed. An electrical crater depends only upon the charge transferred between celestial bodies. Large craters are most likely to occur during the close approach of planet-sized bodies. Such large bodies will also induce massive ground currents, causing the mysterious continental flood basalts at the same time. Electrical craters often appear in connected chains on other bodies in the solar system. The gravitational anomalies and asymmetry of the Chicxulub basin suggests it may be the centermost of a buried crater chain.

<snip>

(article continues)

Jan 30, 2006
The Mystery of Chicxulub Crater
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/ ... crater.htm

[Lloyd]

http://www.geocities.com/devashaon/inde ... ulate.html
- IRIDIUM – RHODIUM - RUTHENIUM
Twenty-eight rhodium, iridium, or ruthenium complexes were evaluated for their in vitro antibacterial activity against Enterococcus faecalis ATCC 29212, Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 29213, Escherichia coli ATCC 25922 and Pseudomonaa aeruginosa ATCC 27853
- Microorganisms complicate the k-t boundary
Ancient bacteria, from the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary of some 65 million years ago [are found in] a thin "spike" of iridium that is found worldwide, and which was supposedly deposited by the asteroid impact that helped finish off the dinosaurs. The problem is that the iridium layer is variable in thickness and concentration from site to site. This variability has tended to undermine the asteroid-impact theory. Recent experiments at Wheaton College by B.D. Dyer et al have demonstrated that bacteria in ground water can both concentrate and disperse iridium deposits. In other words, bacteria could smear out an iridium spike, perhaps partially erase it, or even move it to a deeper or shallower layer of sediment. (Monastersky, R.; "Microbes Complicate the K-T Mystery," Science News, 136: 341, 1989.)
http://www.geocities.com/devashaon/inde ... ulate.html
- Bacteria Known to actively Transmute Elements
Bacillus Subtilus 168-------------------------------Gold
Thiobacillus Ferro-oxidans--------------------------Iron
Sulflobus Breirlyi----------------------------------Iron & Molybdenum
Pseudomonus Aeruginosa------------------------------Uranium
Beer Yeast & Rhizopus Arryhizus-------------------- Ur extracted waste Water
Sphaerotilus Leptothrix & hyphomicrobium------------Manganese
Sphaerotilus Leptothrix & Gallionella---------------Iron
Algae Spirogyra, oscillatoria, chara & rhizoclonium Mo, Se, Ur & Ra
Algae Synechococcus---------------------------------Cadmium
Actinomyces Streptomycin----------------------------Calcium From (Si + C)
Laminaria Algae-------------------------------------Iodine
Kelp on Schist(Sn) & sandstone----------------------Bromine
Pseudononas--extracts radioactive-------------------Mercury
- These next 3 sets of bacteria flourish in the presence of their stimulant metals & so may also be capable of transmutation into a safer environmental situation where these metals are contaminants.
Micrococcus luteus & Azotobactor spp.---------------Lead
Chlamydomonas reinhardi-----------------------------Mercury
Methylobacterium spp.-------------------------------Tungsten or Molydenum
Spirogyra, Rhizoclonium, Hydrodictyon & Cladophora--Lead

[Lloyd]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_synthesis
- Gold synthesis in a particle accelerator is possible in many ways. The Spallation Neutron Source has a liquid Mercury target that will be transmuted into Gold, Platinum and Iridium, which are lower in atomic number.
- Gold synthesis in a nuclear reactor
In a nuclear reactor, gold can be manufactured by irradiation of platinum or mercury. Since platinum is more expensive than gold, platinum is economically unsuitable as a raw material. Only the mercury isotope Hg-196, which occurs with a frequency of 0.15% in natural mercury, can be converted to gold by neutron capture, and following K+- decay into Au-197 with slow neutrons. Other mercury isotopes are converted when irradiated with slow neutrons into one another or formed mercury isotopes, which beta decay into thallium. Using fast neutrons, the mercury isotope Hg-198, which is contained to 9.97% in natural mercury, can be converted by splitting off a neutron and becoming Hg-197, which then disintegrates to stable gold. This reaction, however, possesses a smaller activation cross-section and is feasible only with un-moderated reactors. It is also possible to eject several neutrons with very high energy into the other mercury isotopes in order to get the Hg-197. However such high-energy neutrons can be produced only by particle accelerators.
http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResource ... _popup.htm
Neutron activation (bombardment) is the means in which two very important industrial radiographic sources, Cobalt-59 (Co-59) and Iridium-191 (Ir-191), are produced. ... Exposing these elements to a large thermal neutron flux (neutrons with energies less than 0.4 eV) enables the stable element to capture a thermal neutron and thus becoming one mass unit heavier.
http://www.platinummetalsreview.com/pdf ... 64-064.pdf
Thermocouples Under Neutron Bombardment
... Pure platinum when irradiated produces only gold and mercury, each reaching a maximum concentration of rather less than 1 per cent after a year's exposure to a flux of on/cm/sec. Under similar conditions, however, the rhodium content of rhodium-platinum alloys is almost- completely consumed, to form palladium, mercury, gold and iridium. ... The palladium content of palladium-platinum alloys is not greatly affected although small quantities of mercury, gold, cadmium, silver, iridium and rhodium are formed by transmutation. ... Platinum alloys increase in volume under neutron irradiation by amounts ranging up to z per cent after one year at Io1%/cm2/sec. ... tungsten-rhenium thermocouples will suffer more damage ... than platinum-based thermocouples under similar conditions of neutron bombardment.

[electrodogg1]

Lloyd,

Please don't post in pink or magenta fonts. It's very hard for us old guys to read.

[Grey Cloud]

Lloyd,

Please don't post in pink or magenta fonts. It's very hard for us old guys to read. :)

Seconded.
This is Electric Universe not Barbie World. I had enough of the latter with my daughters (I'm still having the nightmares). :lol:

[StefanR]

Lots of pictures and lots of mainstream info about impacts:

Section 18: Basic Science II: Impact Cratering

Distribution of Craters / Cratering Mechanics / Shock Metamorphism / Crater Morphology; Major Impact Structures / Remote Sensing of Craters
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Front/tofc.html

[Steve Smith]

I seriously doubt that any crater on Earth was caused by impact. In another thread I mentioned Kebira Crater, which was most likely the cause of the fragments of glass that are scattered in the Great Sand Sea near Gilf Kebir. The glass chunks are incredibly pure -- so much so that Egyptologist who found a piece in King Tut's tomb wrote that such purity was impossible for modern glass-makers, so how did the ancients do it?

The answer is that the glass was not man made, but was formed by fusing the silica sands at incredible temperatures. If the glass had been created by impact, then it would be contaminated by halite and alumina, the predominant minerals in the area, but it is as clear as water. The interesting feature about the "desert glass" is that dark swirls of pure iridium are emdedded within in. Tiny bubbles of cristabolite, a mineral that is formed at extremely high temeratures, are also there. How?

The so-called K/T boundary layer contains spherules of glass that are high in iridium -- they might have come from Popigai Crater, or from Chesapeake Bay. Currently, those two formations are the probable sources for the glass beads. In Bass River, New Jersey are thick layers of glass spherules just off the coast at almost a thousand meters depth. They are also clear as glass.

Here's a tip that Lloyd originally gave me about searching this site for information. If you want to find articles about a particular topic type in Google, site:thunderbolts.info "search term"

Putting "crater" as the search term returned these results (abbreviated list):

Richat Crater Revisited (2) Aug 12, 2005 ... Why, for these craters, is it so difficult to find evidence of impact that cannot also be explained by electrical discharge, ...
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/ ... visit2.htm - 13k - Cached - Similar pages

Aorounga Crater May 3, 2006 ... Satellite radar images of the Sahara desert north of Chad have revealed the presence of craters not easily noticed in normal aerial ...
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/ ... crater.htm - 14k - Cached - Similar pages

Popigai Crater, Siberia Jan 7, 2008 ... The infamous Tunguska crater is not the only site in Siberia where tremendous high-energy events have taken place.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/ ... crater.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

Richat Crater Revisited Aug 11, 2005 ... Why do these three craters and a fourth line up and why are they so circular?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/ ... evisit.htm - 10k - Cached - Similar pages

Manicouagan: Impact Crater or Lightning Scar? Nov 26, 2007 ... A giant ring-shaped crater in Canada seems to be the result of a meteor strike. Could electrical scarring be a better explanation?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/ ... ouagan.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

Libya's Kebira Crater Apr 24, 2006 ... A huge crater in the Sahara desert, said to be the largest one ever found in the region, and dwarfing Arizona's "Meteor Crater", ...
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/ ... kebira.htm - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

Pictures of the Day have constantly harped on the fact that asteroids probably *can't* strike the Earth (see "Exploding Bolides"). They develop such intense electrical stress that they disintegrate at altitude. Peakskill was nothing but a few small stones when it finally reached Earth, for example. I think there's a Picture of the Day about Peakskill in the archive, as well.