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Re: Bernd: Meteor May Not Have Destroyed Dinosaurs Afterall?
- To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com
- Subject: Re: Bernd: Meteor May Not Have Destroyed Dinosaurs Afterall?
- From: Ron Baalke <BAALKE@kelvin.jpl.nasa.gov>
- Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 14:39:21 GMT
- Old-X-Envelope-To: <meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com>
- Resent-Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 10:41:05 -0400 (EDT)
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- Resent-Message-ID: <d2l80C.A.kVB.a81-3@mu.pair.com>
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>To suggest that impact debris could remain suspended in the atmosphere for
>many years is absurd. Rocket experiments by several nations during the 1970s
>showed that even very small particles - about the size of cigarette smoke -
>take only about 8 weeks to descend from the ionosphere to the troposphere
>before raining out of the system.
In these experiments, was 100% of the particles accounted for, or was
just a percentage of the particles detected to come down?
Impact debris from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter was still visible
in Jupiter's upper atmopshere a year after the impact. The particles
were visible from Earth (~450 million miles away) on a planet with
many times more gravity than Earth. If particles can stay in the
atmosphere of a giant planet for a year, I don't see why particles
can't stay suspended for years in the atmosphere of a much smaller planet.
Ron Baalke
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