6 thoughts on “The Four Horsemen”

  1. “Fifty thousand years ago, a nickel-iron asteroid this size left a crater more than a kilometer wide in Arizona.”

    I was once on a Southwest flight when the pilot came on the intercom and announced: “Those of you on the right side of the plane can see Meteor Crater, where a giant meteor hit the ground 50,000 years ago and left that gigantic crater. And look! It just missed that house!”

    For some reason, I was the only person on the plane who found that hilarious. It was my favorite pilot joke of all time, though.

  2. I like to imagine the first Paleoindians finding the crater, looking at each other, and saying, “What the wiinuk d’you suppose happpened here?!” My first visit, when I walked out on the deck, I wasn’t expecting the scale of the thing.

    1. “That house” is actually the Visitors’ Center. I was there too, and it is lucky that nothing happened to either of us!

      1. Me too. If you drive there as you get within 20 or so miles of the site you’ll start to see interesting rocks scattered about. They look like igneous rock on one side and sedimentary on the other. They were originally sedimentary. They partially melted and reformed, looking igneous because they were heated to the melting point being ejecta from the meteor’s impact.

        Paul, possibly of interest to you and somewhat closer?:

        At the Visitor’s Center you’ll also learn that Meteor Crater is not the only impact site in North America. Just the best preserved. One as big as that hit near Kentland Indiana, but active geology in a temperate zone has largely erased it.

        https://www.impactcraters.us/kentland_indiana

  3. Gamma Ray Bursts.

    Boy talk about the unlucky of the unlucky. Not even a tin foil can save you from this speed of light disaster. But hey why worry about something so unlikely? Like I seriously doubt that things would end with no warni. . . …

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