[meteorite-list] Comet impact!

[MexicoDoug at aol.com]

Eric O. wrote:

Hola Eric,

Those are good thoughts for perspective... agreed, but add to the 
perspective, it is  enough water to fill 704.2 million cans of Coke (assuming those are 
metric tons which is about 10% than you figured, and nearly a mini tsunami of 
207 feet x 207 feet x 207 feet vs. the 200 you also got.

It is also enough to provide enough to drink for every man, woman and child 
in the USA for one full day.

A bit, when you consider the small comet was bopped with a solid impactor 
much less than the size of a washing machine...wonder how many clothes that cube 
would wash?  All of New York City's for a day or two?

And if instead of dealing with liquid water, suppose we looked at the vapor 
in the clouds and up a column in the atmosphere.  This is the Hydrometeor 
profile, i.e., if you took a column say one kilometer square at the base and 
extended it from land (or sea) to the end of the atmosphere, do you know how much 
water is in that if all the water were condensed to liquid and leveled on the 
surface at standard conditions?  A one kilometer monument built to the heavens, 
is measured by the TRMM satellite programs, but I can't hand the data to know 
how much, though it would be interesting to know how much water is in the 
clouds...!

http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/datapool/TRMM/01_Data_Products/01_Orbital/0
5_Tmi_Prof_2A_12/

And enough, speaking of clouds, when you consider there are supposedly mind 
boggling numbers of these comets in the Oort Cloud.

Saludos, Doug



<< Dave Harris wrote:
 
 <Amazing to see that the copper target that clouted the Comet Tempel 1
 kicked out 250,000 tons of water when it collided!
 There a great lot of info on the Web on this, but I wonder how this fits in
 with how there's so much water on Earth....was it transported via cometary
 collisions or the product of chemical reactions (or both, indeed!)?>
 
 250,000 tons of water sounds like a lot, but to put it into perspective it 
would fill a: 
 
 cube  200.08 feet on a side
 football field including endzones to a height of 138.9 feet
 official soccer field max size 360x240 feet to a height of  92.6 feet
 cylinder radius 200 feet would have a height of 63.7 feet
 cylinder radius 300 feet would have a height of just 8.6 feet
 cone radius 300 feet would have a height of 85 feet
 
     If you say a cone roughly approximates a crater shape and the comet is 
half water half other stuff by volume then a cone radius 300 feet would need a 
depth of 170 feet to accommodate 250000 tons of water.   That is a big hole, 
but still smaller than most people would image when they think of 250,000 tons 
of water.
 
 --
 Eric Olson >>