Could Large rocks like Australia’s Uluru (Ayers Rock) be the Meteor that Wiped Out the Dinosaurs?
Neat question! :)
But nope. If that was a meteor, it wouldn’t still be there. Meteors, Hit, HARD.
Lookee this pic here, it’s the Barringer crater in Arizona, USA:
Crazy, hey?
This impact crater, is 1,200 m (3,900 ft) in diameter, some 170 m (560 ft) deep, and is surrounded by a rim that rises 45 m (148 ft) above the surrounding plains.
Y’know what hit it? A meteor, made of nickel & iron, and about 50 meters (160 feet) across, slammed into Arizona 50,000 years ago, travelling at 20 km (12 miles) per second — or about 30 x faster than our fastest commercial airliners. There is *nothing* left of that 50 meter metal ball. When it hit, it went off with the power equivalent of a 10 megaton nuclear bomb…. 10 million tons of sticks of TNT in a pile being set off together. That is on explosive par with the most powerful nuclear bombs ever made — or about 800 times the size of the atom bombs that leveled Hiroshima & Nagasaki in WW2.
Here is a picture of Australia’s Uluru rock formation :
..that’s…what would you say? about a km (a little more than half a mile) across?
If this were a large sandstone meteor that smacked into the side of the Earth, it would not have been quite big enough to end the dinosaurs, although its effects would’ve been worldwide. The impact from this much mass as a meteor, would’ve been thousands of times more powerful than the entire world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, blown up at once, and in one place. There would be *NOTHING* left of Uluru, and there would be a massive crater, maybe a dozen km wide!
While we’re here, let’s take a quick look at the Chicxulub crater. That’s the crater in Central America, just recently discovered, that is the best bet right now, for the impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
The reason it took until 1978 to find the Chicxulub crater, is that I-T, I-S, E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S:
This is what it may have looked like for the thousands of years after the impact. By now, it’s very much eroded, and faded, over the past 66 million years - so it was hard to realize that these long worn-down rings were part of one big circle. Here’s what the crater looks like (in red) on a map of Southern USA & Central America
That crater is about 150 km (100 miles) across! That’s almost certainly, is the impact that ended the dinosaurs. It’s far more powerful than the 50 meter 10 megaton meteor, or if Uluru was a meteor, a 2 km 100’s of thousands of megaton meteor, the planet-crusher meteor that caused this nasty scar on the side of our Earth, came from a meteor that may have been 10–15 km (6–9 miles) across, and made a 100 million megaton explosion! That’s the equivalent to having 20 Hiroshima atomic bombs going off, on every square mile of the Earth, from North to South pole, over land and the oceans — every square km of Earth, having 20 Hiroshima sized bombs going off at once. That’s the level of destruction we’re looking at here.
That’s a crazy huge meteor! (well, meteorite, when it hit). Fortunately, NASA’s very confident that they have now tracked all of the few remaining objects of this size that could collide with the Earth, called Near Earth Objects (or NEAs). We’re doing an impressive job of finding all of the remaining NEAs, but the ones left are potential city-destroyers and not wreakers-of-destruction world-changing sized ones.
City-destroyers like the Chelyabinsk meteor, which hit decently far away from any civilization, in Northern Russia in Feb of 2013. A 20 meter wide asteroid fell to Earth and caused a 500 kiloton (0.5 megaton) explosion, or about 35 Hiroshima atomic bombs. If something even that small, 20 meters, were to happen to hit a heavily populated city, it would flatten almost all, if not all, of the city.
The neat thing about the Chelyabinsk event, is that someone caught it on their dash-cam!
