Impact Craters by Thermonuclear Explosion
Thermonuclear Mechanism --- Crater Central Peaks
.Q: How does high velocity impact produce thermonuclear explosion?
.CC: Nuclear fusion requires extreme temperatures (to get particle collisions that break up the existing nuclei) and extreme pressures (to keep the pieces from going anywhere until they get a chance to clank back together into larger nuclei).
- In an impact, the momentum is thermalized, so there's the heat source.
- And until all of the momentum is thermalized, the remaining inertial force provides the pressure.
- And there is no theoretical limit to the amount of energy that can be stored in momentum.
- The velocity "might" be limited to the speed of light, but there is no limit on the amount of mass involved.
- So at least hypothetically, it's an easy reach to conclude that an impact would create the necessary temperatures and pressures for fusion.
- I'm satisfied that it's a hypothetical possibility, and that its properties match the observations.
.Q: How can central peaks contain strata like the surrounding bedrock?The Craters Are Electric (thunderbolts.info)
.CC: This is a well-known fluid dynamic phenomenon, which would be an expected property of the ejecta from a thermonuclear explosion.
- When a high-velocity jet hits a perpendicular surface, it accomplishes little erosion where the jet is actually perpendicular.
- This is because there is nowhere for the fluid (i.e., nuclear ejecta) to go, so there is no excavation.
- Away from the normal point, the fluid can gouge out material and carry it off.
- So at the center of the crater, the only material that was removed was by simple vaporization.
- Away from the center, it's vaporization plus entrainment into the high velocity flow, which is more efficient at removing material.
- While on the topic of impacts, my "rolling electrodynamic meteor" epiphany hasn't fully satisfied me, and I kept thinking that I never actually fully answered webolife's questions, concerning a net charge that couldn't get fully neutralized fast enough, resulting in an electrostatic explosion.
- So I did some more thinking, and I came up with another epiphany.
- This concerns something that I have never fully understood about shock waves in front of supersonic objects.
.Q: How can large craters form on small asteroids, moons etc, without blowing them up?
Psyche – The Thunderbolts Project™
- Thornhill has said that bolide impacts could not make large craters on small asteroids, or moons, because they would break them apart. Wouldn't that be true?
.CC: An iron-core asteroid getting hit by a bolide half its size wouldn't necessarily get destroyed in the process.
- Also, keep in mind that the size of the bolide and the size of the crater are two different things.
- If the crater was formed by a thermonuclear explosion, a 1 km crater might have been formed by a 1 m bolide, and the 10 km asteroid wouldn't necessarily get destroyed by something like that.
- Also, the flat bottom craters are suggestive of an explosive that had an easy time excavating the dust at the surface, but didn't leave a dent on the solid rock below the dust.
- So again, the impactor might have actually been extremely small.
Q. Some [impact craters] have bullseye craters within the craters, either in place of the central peaks, or on top of the central peaks. Would those also be explained by your bolide thermonuclear explosion theory?
CC. I think so. I'm proposing two different material removal mechanisms: vaporization and entrainment. Vaporization occurs by direct contact with the nuclear ejecta, where temperatures above the boiling point convert the solids or liquids to gases or plasmas. Entrainment (in this context) is the excavation of loose material by high-velocity winds. In the center of the bullseye, you'll get vaporization (perhaps in a concave form), but not much entrainment where the nuclear ejecta hit the surface normal to it, and didn't have anywhere to go from there. The entrainment occurs where the ejecta hit the surface at an angle and then went further afield, gouging out stuff in the process. For example, in the Tunguska event, trees directly under the blast were left standing, though the branches were stripped off, while trees away from the perpendicular point were knocked down. So it's that sideways motion, away from the perpendicular point, that can do the excavating.
Q. Upside-down Shattercones: Do you mean you consider a traveling underground electric current blast to be unlikely?
I don't know. If there was an earthquake or a bolide impact, yes, but how would a huge lightning strike become an underground blast? {Impacts often form shattercones in rock strata, like in this image.}
Q. Cook theorized that an object much larger than a meteor or asteroid must have caused the devastation of North America nearly 10,000 years ago. He didn't suggest that the entire biosphere was wiped out, just that of North America, which continent must have been facing the planet whose plasmasphere upon contact with Earth's apparently caused the shockwave that caused the devastation.
CC. I think that the evidence is piling up for a comet impact (i.e., much larger than a meteor or asteroid) on the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Iridium levels are well above normal, but less than the K/T impact, and other markers are clearly indicative of an impact, through different in one way or another from "typical" impacts. It's possible that the uniqueness of the event came from a comet bouncing off of the ice sheet, leaving some extraterrestrial markers, yet not as much as one would expect from something that had such dramatic effects, and without leaving a crater anywhere. While I respect Cook's in-depth scholarship as well as his open-mindedness, I think that the data will eventually decide this one.
YDI Hypothesis © Charles Chandler
CC. Despite the fact that I remain skeptical of Velikovski's ideas, I still believe that ancient symbols and lore were inspired by celestial events. I just think that it was a swarm of asteroids that came through, lighting up the daytime sky, causing a few impacts, and generally doing a pretty good job of making a lasting impression on the humans who were running around at the time, before heading back out into the interplanetary medium.
And I believe that this was the Younger Dryas event(s). The one impact that we know about is the one that hit the Laurentide Ice Sheet, sending huge chunks of ice through the air, which caused the Carolina Bays when they bounced, before landing somewhere in the Atlantic. There could have also been a number of other near misses, and there could have been arc discharges powerful enough to catch everybody's attention. Just imagine what it would have been like to have been a hunter gatherer, 12900 BP, witnessing such events! And how would you explain such things to your children? I think that future generations then attempted to rationalize the stories, and mapped the events to objects that they could still find in the night sky, leaving us with lore associated with known planets from events that had nothing to do with the planets. The swarm that left its mark on our planet, and changed the evolutionary path of humans, while causing the extinction of many other species, is long gone. But it's interesting to consider the possibility that we could actually piece it all together someday, from the lore and from the scientific evidence. People don't just make up wild-n-crazy stories about things that don't relate directly to everyday life. So when such stories pop up all over the place, there has to be a reason.
And this is not an under-developed hunch. Two of my uncles were noted authorities on ancient history, including the study of mythology (i.e., Tertius Chandler, author of "Godly Kings and Early Ethics" and "4,000 Years of Urban Growth", and William Doty, author of "Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader" and "Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals" to name a few). Both of them could tell us how to distinguish between a popular story (because it is a projection of human psyche) versus the record of an actual event (because there are central aspects to the story that cannot be shown to have originated from within the minds of the storytellers). So if you tell me that there are numerous, repeating references to dramatic events in the sky, and ancient symbols that don't look like any common objects here on Earth, but do look like plasma discharges, and that there was an Earth-shattering impact 12900 BP, I'm going to think that the stories were all about the asteroid swarm.
But both of my uncles always insisted that all of the facts were taken into account, and that room be left for alternate interpretations. Your first thought isn't always your last! Knowledge isn't a position — it's a process.
MORE ON THE YDI
{From another site:} Younger Dryas Extinction (scientificpsychic.com)
Based on the convergence point of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins, the impact point is Saginaw Bay and the crater may be Huron Lake whose deepest point is perfectly aligned with Saginaw Bay. The law of conservation of energy allows us to use the energy required to form all the Carolina Bays to estimate the energy of the extraterrestrial impact, which corresponds to an asteroid with a diameter of 3 kilometers. An impact of this size would create a fireball with a radius of 30 kilometers that would ignite fires hundreds of kilometers from the impact site. The fireball would be followed by an airblast with hurricane force winds that would blow down most trees and strip off the leaves of the ones that remained standing. Any animals or humans within 500 kilometers of the explosion would be killed or severely injured, but the worst phase of the extinction was yet to come {i.e. the secondary impacts of ice boulders, particles and powder over a 1500 km radius.}
See also: CATACLYSMIC EARTH HISTORY and ANCIENT MYTHS ARE EARTH HISTORY