It is said that an asteroid the size of mount Everest killed the dinosaurs. Hitting a 3 ft sphere of rock with a 1/32" grain of sand is equivalent of that shock. How come such a small shock made such big destruction?
The mechanics of the impact are pretty well understood. (There’s a nice Wiki article….). This chunk of rock would have struck the earth at somewhere between 30–40,000 mph. Only a tiny bit of it would have “ablated” in it’s passage through the atmosphere.On impact, the object would have penetrated quite deeply due to it’s immense kinetic energy. Essentially, all of it’s mass, and all the mass of the material it penetrated, would have been rendered molten and would have shot back out of the crater area, with a lot of it actually escaping the atmosphere and going into space.This “ejecta”, in molten form, would have cooled into tiny particles of rock and glass and under the gravitational attraction of the Earth, would have re-entered the atmosphere as billions of meteorites.Meteorites strike the Earth’s atmosphere daily with no problems, but with this enormous mass falling into the atmosphere it’s reckoned that the atmosphere may have been heated to several hundred degrees, causing massive devastation to animal and plant life that was not sheltered in some way.To add to that, the huge amount of material thrust into the atmosphere as smoke, ash, and other debris would have greatly decreased the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface for months at least, and perhaps years. This would have caused further die-off of plant life and would have disrupted ecological systems all over the world.Recent research indicates that the impact point was a “perfect storm” of location that facilitated the damage and effects.
Why are sea shells found on the top of mt everest?
When they climbed Mt Everest in 1953, Edmund Hillary got up to the 26 000 foot level and he began to find sea shells. Some stuff they found up there were Petrified clams and Sea shells packed together. Millions of them. Interesting thing about these clams, that are even found of top of Mt Everest, the clams are petrified and dead, I believe, and closed. Well you can walk along the beach and pick up a whole train load of sea shells but you hardly ever find a matched pair. And you never find them closed. The only way this could happen is these had to be buried alive. ..... How do you get these on top of Mt Everest? In case you don't know, Mt Everest is a little ways from the beach. Secondly, clams don't climb mountains very good. So what happened to these petrified claims anyway? Some places they are ten feet thick in the world. ..... Well the only way I can think of this to happen is for an awful lot of clams to be buried instantly. I think during the Flood of Noah ..... What do you think?
What would happen to Earth if an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest were to hit Earth at 99.9999% of the speed of light?
After a little digging about I found the following frame of reference:1: Everest weighs approximately 357,000,000,000,000 pounds (or 3.57x10^14 lbs in short)2: Light travels at 299792 kilometers / second (rounding the number to sub-light speed makes no discernible difference at this point)For your question I feel we’ll likely be most interested in kinetic energy. Allowing me to work in similar frame to the second law of motion but with a slight caveat.The 2nd law states F=Ma, but the equation for kinetic energy asks that the ‘force’ is halved. KE = 0.5 × m × v^2Also keep in mind that for a body in motion the speed is noted as x per second per second and so must be squared for use in the equation.now we have a ‘speed’ of 89875243264 km/sMultiply by the mass and we find the ‘joule’ energy equivalent of that mass at that speed.We find that the ‘force’ of the impact to be more than 4 sextillion joules, which is several magnitudes greater than every nuclear bomb on earth simultaneously.Every nuclear bomb thus far tested on earth combines to an output only about 2 or 3 trillion joules of energy.So, with an impact force about 2 billion times more powerful than every nuke ever tested I think It’s safe to say there won’t be a lot of anything left.[additional edit]After a little extra digging I found that based on current nuclear tech it would take only 1.2 million nuclear blasts to utterly eradicate humanity from Earth, to put that against the original question; the impact is many, many billion times more powerful than is required could destroy all life on earth.post ed]As has been pointed out by a few folk, my maths above is (at best) the most simplified form of the equation… the ‘real’ outcome is far higher as it takes into account relativistic speed.Due note should be given to Yigit Işık and Rishi Chandra both pointing out my error.To quote Yigit “Even if the kinetic energy equation could be used in this situation, the result would end up as = 7.28 x 10^30”Which is far higher levels of energy than even I had calculated.
If you dropped Mt. Everest from 180,000 feet, how much damage would it cause compared to a nuclear bomb?
I'm probably doing this wrong, but here goes:The altitude makes it harder to calculate, because at that altitude (55 km) gravity is much weaker. But the altitude is also irrelevant in this case because air resistance will cause the mountain to reach terminal velocity long before it hits the ground.A quick google querry gives us a terminal velocity of about 200 mph (How to Identify a Meteorite -- Step 2) for rocks. This will be a bit off because Mt Everest would tumble like a pile of giant bricks and sand, and the wind resistance for such a large object would be difficult to precisely calculate.We can also guess Mt Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds (The Wild File | Outside Online). That's also a very rough guess.The formula for kinetic energy is one half of mass times velocity squared (I wont show metric conversions or math here), so my calculation is that Mt Everest would hit the ground with about 637,640,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy. A 1 megaton nuclear bomb is about 4,000,000,000,000,000 joules. So that means that Mt. Everest would create the equivalent effect of a 159 megaton bomb.Thats pretty underwhelming considering you just dropped a mountain from space.The actual effect would be alot different. The mountain would crumble as it fell. Large pieces might hit the ground first in perhaps a 30 second window, causing a prolonged earthquake sensation hundreds of miles away. Smaller rubble would fall over the next few minutes, and dust could hang in the air for days, being blown around the world by the jet stream.The atmosphere slowed it down a lot, but we didn't lose that energy. It superheated the rocks like a space capsule reentering Earth’s atmosphere. A massive column of air 30 miles high was pushed out of the way, and its going to spring back, following the mountain down. Hurricane force winds will hit the crash site, blowing outward, hurtling molten chucks of rock the size of apartment buildinds and automobiles tens or hundreds of miles away.Its likely such an impact could trigger dozens of natural earthquakes around the world, and affect weather patterns. Just the dust cloud would probably cause a nuclear winter for a year or five.
How much force would I need to apply to destroy a mountain with a shock wave from my fist?
I just realized something in the middle of doing this problem. You will see towards the end.Let's first consider the amount of energy we need to break a rock.I'm going to assume that the mountain is made of concrete, because I really don't have information for other types of rocks.The tensile strength of concrete is about 4 megapascals.Say that you are at the top of the mountain, which is approximately 5000m from its base, and you have a spherical hand with radius approximately 10 cm.After some calculations involving the inverse square law (which just translates to reciprocal since energy is the square of the amplitude), we see that your hand has to exert a pressure of at least 200000000000 = 2*10^11 pascals. And that's just to crack the mountain a little at the baseUnfortunately, that's far above the compression strength of any part of the mountain, so a lot of that energy will be lost very quickly. Any normal amount of force/power you apply here will probably just break the tip of the mountain and cause the pieces to fly away faster with increasing pressure. It's like hitting a hammer on a giant boulder; even if you hit it extremely hard, chances are that you will only break a small part of it, even though the pieces that come out are moving rapidly.So if you want to break the mountain, what you need is either have a huge hand exerting a smaller amount of pressure over a larger area, or you need to use some method other than pressure waves, because pressure waves would quickly be diminished by the energy lost due to breaking rocks flying away at high velocities. Thinking about hitting a cannonball in the sand, it can make a huge crater, but it can't make a _deep_ crater. Anything that ends up breaking the mountain would not be a "shockwave", but something else.(Preferred methods: heating up the mountain until it vaporizes (this one is actually easier to calculate), increasing the pressure such that it hits the critical point where solids act as liquids (but that's still not enough), asteroid impact (pressure over a large area), or a relativistic punch (comparable to the speed of light))