[HN Gopher] Controversial impact crater under Greenland's ice is...
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Controversial impact crater under Greenland's ice is surprisingly
ancient
Author : rbanffy
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-03-10 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| politelemon wrote:
| Although the article says that particular strike didn't cause a
| temperature plunge, is it implying that an impact _can_ cause a
| temperature plunge?
|
| Ridiculous thought that just came to my head, can our current
| climate problems be mitigated somehow with a well...
| precisioned... humanity-created impact or explosion? I wonder if
| some kooky people have considered this as a solution.
| ectopod wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
| pmichaud wrote:
| Yes definitely! A large impact can kick enough debris into the
| atmosphere to cool the earth. And people have floated the
| possibility of injecting basically a bunch of "debris" to
| combat global warming.
|
| The problem is that the system is chaotic and injecting and
| then maintaining the exactly correct level of debris that cools
| us off a bit without triggering a global crop failure or
| runaway ice age is effectively impossible, not to mention the
| air quality issues intrinsic to basically all versions of this
| scenario.
| [deleted]
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Me naively thinks its better to ie put some nano foil which
| takes ie 5% of the light passing through on some stable orbit
| between earth and sun and have sun blocked without any
| further particulate pollution, which would end up falling on
| us while we breath it.
|
| It has benefit that its position may degrade on its own over
| time, or be just moved when convenient. Still a gargantuan
| engineering project, possibly out of reach for current
| technology to do reliably.
| fifi_conner wrote:
| It's completely doable, it just takes some multi-government
| commitment.
|
| A fleet of solar sails would be the cheapest and fastest,
| for example, it can accomplish this with great redundancy,
| whilst being steerable and powered using the very sun
| they'll block.
|
| The size of the sails would have to be huge, so a very
| interesting engineering problem to be solved.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
| willcipriano wrote:
| That reminds me of a meme I can't find.
|
| Scientists: We can block out the sun to prevent climate change!
|
| Me: Is it going to rain tomorrow?
|
| Scientists: The climate is a complicated system we can't
| just...
|
| Me: Leave the fucking sun alone
| pharke wrote:
| Changing the Earth's albedo at the surface would be more
| controllable than pumping a bunch of particulate matter into
| the atmosphere. Probably a lot more expensive as well but the
| tradeoff is worth it since it would allow you to quickly undo
| it or modify it if things go badly.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| High-albedo urban areas also generally need less power for
| cooling during warm weather.
| alophawen wrote:
| It's explained in great detail in this infomercial
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYpUSjSgFg
| sdeframond wrote:
| The problem is not so much climate warming but climate _change_
| : the increase in temperature is not even and the consequences
| are much more dramatic than a mere +2C. Dry places become
| drier, wet places become wetter, windy places become winder and
| so on.
|
| I would bet a big asteroid-like explosion would not be finely
| controlled and would cause unexpected changes too...
| lizardactivist wrote:
| MaxMoney wrote:
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| Anyone knows Randall Carlson's take on this ?
| paulrouget wrote:
| He said, if it were 12000 years old, that would be a massive
| clue for the Hancock's theories. Well... it's a little bit
| older. Not what they hoped for.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| >researchers say it occurred 58 million years ago
|
| Only by a bit.
| platz wrote:
| Hancock's an idiot but Randall at least seems to be nominally
| based in science.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I've been listening to Randall's Kosmographia podcast Younger
| Dryas episodes. In the multiple episodes he lays out research
| supporting and detracting from the YD impact hypothesis. When
| they discuss the Hiawatha impact crater it is regarded as a
| possibility but not a sure thing with correlation to YD being
| reserved until more evidence is found. From what I have heard
| Randall is more of a credible independent scientist than he is
| given credit for. There is very little jumping to conclusions
| and always demanding evidence to support hypotheses.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I guess they finally found The Fortress of Solitude...
| smoyer wrote:
| Pedantic but an impact crater either is or is not. Scientists
| (and others) might have controversial opinions, theories and
| hypothesis' about the crater and us mere mortals will be forced
| to take sides.
| hvjackson wrote:
| Controversial means "of, relating to, or arousing controversy
| [1]", it doesn't mean the existence is disputed.
|
| E.g. a controversial drug, controversial news report,
| controversial rule.
|
| [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/controversial
| MaxMoney wrote:
| tt89778344 wrote:
| It is visible on Google Maps here
| https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/78%C2%B043'28.6%22N+66%C...
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Is this the cause of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum? Even
| though it is too old to be tied to the Younger Dryas impact
| hypothesis it is still around the age attributed to a transition
| in geological epochs. The end of the Paleocene was marked by a
| mass extinction of 30-50% of species. During the following Eocene
| epoch, with presumably many empty niches, there were many new
| species that evolved.
|
| The more we look, the more evidence we are finding that periodic
| mass extinctions are caused by cosmic impacts.
| lumost wrote:
| This begs the ancillary question - would faster cosmic impacts
| speed up or slow down evolution? There are surely habitable
| planets with impacts orders of magnitude more and less impacts.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I assume by faster you mean more frequent. When it comes to
| impacts faster just means more destructive. However, an
| increase in frequency of large impacts could cut off
| evolutionary pathways. For example, frequent impacts could
| make the land uninhabitable to most species.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I'm consistently impressed and grateful that we live in times
| where we have the science to understand these relatively
| unimportant but very interesting facts about the world.
|
| "Nearly 50 grains of sand collected from the same watershed,
| analyzed using the decay of radioactive potassium to argon,
| yielded about the same age"
|
| I'm familiar with the science, and maybe I'm just easily
| impressed, but this sort of line always lightly blows my mind.
| antishatter wrote:
| I've seen the Thing, just fuckin leave it there.
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