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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (5039)	8/2/2002 6:51:30 AM
From: jackmore	Respond to of 12231

Strange crater found under the sea Rings created by ancient meteorite impact, experts say By Alan Boyle MSNBC July 31 — An otherworldly crater has been discovered hundreds of feet beneath the floor of the North Sea, using sophisticated seismic mapping equipment designed for petroleum exploration. Researchers say the 12-mile-wide, multiringed crater is 60 million to 65 million years old — going back to the end of the dinosaur era — and looks more like impact craters on moons of Jupiter than anything seen on Earth. THE STRUCTURE, dubbed the Silverpit Crater, was likely created by the splashdown of a massive meteorite, researchers report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. But that hypothesis still has to be confirmed through a detailed analysis of rock samples drawn from deep beneath the sea floor. The three-dimensional seismic readings were made in 1992 as part of an effort to map petroleum resources in the North Sea, and over the years they have been reprocessed and acquired by BP. Phil Allen, a geophysicist at Production Geoscience, first noticed the strange features last year, in data from beneath a few hundred yards (meters) of sediment and 130 feet (40 meters) of water. UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY “Phil was mapping deeper stuff in search of gas fields as usual, but noticed the uncharacteristically bumpy nature of the top Cretaceous in the east of the survey,” BP structural geologist Simon Stewart, who is Allen’s collaborator in the Nature research, told MSNBC.com via e-mail. When Allen asked the computer to produce a top-down view of the area, “the dramatic rings around the central crater are what popped out,” Stewart said. The 12-mile-wide (20-kilometer-wide) structure baffled Allen, and he pinned a picture of the crater to his office wall with a handwritten note asking, “Anybody seen anything like this?” During a visit to Allen’s office, Stewart added missing pieces to the puzzle. He had already published research suggesting that impact craters might be detected beneath the North Sea’s floor, where the overlying layers of sediment would preserve structures from the erosion that tends to erase impact craters on land. The feature’s central peak was a characteristic of large impact craters — but the network of concentric rings was like nothing else seen on Earth, the researchers said. Instead, they bore a remarkable similarity to larger multiringed craters on Europa and Callisto, two icy moons of Jupiter. “Silverpit is likely to teach us a great deal about the mechanics of how such ring systems arise,” Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, said in a written statement. An image of the Tyre Crater on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, shows a similar concentric-ring pattern that is 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide. Callisto, another Jovian moon, also has a large concentric-ring crater called Valhalla. Stewart and Allen looked at other hypotheses for how such a structure could have been created — for example, through an up-from-below phenomenon known as salt diapirism. They say they are 99 percent certain the crater was created by a meteorite impact. However, planetary scientist John Spray of the University of New Brunswick said the genesis of such craters “is still a matter of debate.” “The real test that Silverpit was created by an impact will be to look for shock effects in the rocks that form it,” he said in a Nature commentary on the research. HOW LONG AGO? An analysis of the geologic layers led the researchers to estimate the crater’s age at 60 million to 65 million years. If the object that created the crater was a typical rocky meteor, hitting Earth at a typical speed, its diameter would have been about 400 feet (120 meters), Stewart said. “Doesn’t sound big, but remember, that’s over 2 million tons,” he said. The researchers’ estimates put the Silverpit Crater in roughly the same time frame as the Chicxulub impact in Mexico that many scientists think sparked the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Stewart said that if Silverpit was created 60 million years ago, there wouldn’t be any cause to link the two impacts. “On the other hand, if it came out at 65 million years ago, we would have the possibility that Silverpit was in fact a fragment of Chicxulub, leading us to wonder how many other bits are yet to be found in oceanic basins,” he said. “But these aspects are speculation right now.” msnbc.com

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (5039)	8/3/2002 7:47:00 PM
From: Dexter Lives On	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12231

But did sell half in the $60s Nicely done Maurice. If you can keep that powder dry for the next few years, there might be a nice fat opp waiting for you... It could be 18 months to 60 months - who the hell knows?! I'm thinking the worst will be over in 18 months, but acknowledge that this may be wishful thinking... Good luck! Rob BTW I am hereby banning myself (your right this is quite thrilling, but still lacks the ooomph of a Mq ban! -g)