I wonder how many carbon credits you need to offset a “gargantuan” comet strike on Earth? CNET News:
An unseen comet or possibly an icy asteroid apparently crashed into Jupiter’s atmosphere near the giant planet’s south pole sometime during the last few days, creating a “gargantuan” blemish easily visible from Earth.
The presumed impact, discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley July 19 and confirmed by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, came almost 15 years to the day after multiple fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 1994.
“We’re not sure how large this fragment could have been,” Leigh Fletcher, a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told CNET.
“But it certainly had the energy and the momentum that was sizable enough that when it hit the upper atmospheric layers of Jupiter, it created a kind of splash of material that lofted aerosols and gases and various other particulates to really high altitudes.”
Think it can’t happen on Earth? Hmmm. From the Google group “alt.sci.physics”:
A few years ago we got into a discussion about what is the greater threat to planet earth, asteroids (which I define as including some body from outer space, whether meteor or comet) or global warming?
At that time Roger Coppock of alt.global-warming, citing his usual Gaussian backward looking statistical nonsense, showed GW to be a bigger threat than asteroids based on NASA data (which rely on stale data from certain bodies tracked between Mars and Earth), but I pointed out that comet Shoemaker-Levy had struck Jupiter despite being detected only a mere 18 months earlier, which would not have been enough time to deflect it had it headed towards earth. Clearly I had the better argument even back then.
Now comes more evidence that the Oort cloud or Nemesis or some other factor is stirring up the solar system and sending more asteroids into the earth’s solar orbit, as evidenced by yesterday’s undetected strike on Jupiter (see story below).
So I ask again: what’s a bigger threat– a 5 cm rise in mean sea level over the next 100 years (the lower bound of the IPCC’s latest report) due to GW, or an asteroid strike on earth?
Remember either 4 out of the last 5 major extinctions on earth are due to asteroid strikes. . . .
An infrared view of Jupiter showing the remnants
of a presumed comet or asteroid impact.
(Credit: NASA)