[meteorite-list] NPA 07-04-1980 Tektite Ring Made Cold Winter, John O'Keefe

[MARK BOSTICK]

Paper: Chronicle-Telegram
City: Elyria, Ohio
Date: Friday, July 4, 1980
Page: B-3

Cosmic ring made winters colder?

     WASHINGTON (UPI) - Something happened 34 million years ago to send 
winter temperatures plummeting around the world for at least a million years 
while summer temperatures experienced little change.
     The sudden onslaught of severe winters - an average 15 degrees 
Fahrenheit colder by one estimate - amounted to a ecological disaster for 
forest planets and one-celled sea animals called Radiolaria.
     Dr. John A. O'Keefe, an astronomer at the space agency's Goddard 
Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, Md., suggest the shadow of a ring of cosmic 
glass pieces around the Earth was responsible for the sudden winter cooling.

     O'KEEFE FINDS the evidence for such a debris ring in a belt of small 
glassy globules called tektites found strewn across North America to the 
Philippines and Indian Ocean Islands.  The origin of tektites is poorly 
understood but scientists generally believe they came from space.
     Because of the similarities with moon rocks brought back by Apollo 
astronauts, O'Keefe thinks tektites may have come from a lunar eruption.
     The North American tektites have been dating as having formed 34 
million years ago.  Recent studies of microscopic fossils by Dr. B. P. Glass 
of the University of Delaware show that five abundance species of Radiolaria 
disappeared within a few tens of thousands of years of the appearance of the 
tektites.

     IN ADDITION to the tektites that fell on the Earth, O'Keefe suggest 
many others missed the planet and were captured by gravity into orbits 
around the globe.  There first would be cloud of such cosmic debris around 
the Earth but the particles would quickly collapse to form a ring like those 
circling the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus.
     "If there is a connection between tektites and climatic change, then it 
probably results from the screening of sunlight," O'Keefe said in a report 
in a recent issue of the British scientific journal, Nature.
     Any debris ring would form directly above the equator and thus it would 
cut off sunlight in the winter months of the Northern Hemisphere, but not in 
the summer, O'Keefe said.

     THE SHADOW cast by the ring would lower winter temperatures.
     O'Keefe believes the ring disappeared when forces such as the pressure 
of sunlight or the drag or the very thin upper atmosphere pulled particles 
out of the ring.  He calculates such a tektite ring would last a few million 
years.
     Adding support to the theory, O'Keefe said in an interview, is a 
similar correlation of another field of tektites and sudden changes to 
Radiolaria 600,000 years ago.

(end)

Clear Skies,
Mark Bostick
Wichita, Kansas
http://www.meteoritearticles.com
http://www.kansasmeteoritesociety.com
http://www.imca.cc

http://stores.ebay.com/meteoritearticles

PDF copy of this article, and most I post (and about 1/2 of those on my 
website), is available upon e-mail request.

The NPA in the subject line, stands for Newspaper Article. The old list 
server allowed us a search feature the current does not, so I guess this is 
more for quick reference and shortening the subject line now.