Re: Meteoric and Cometary impacts in historical times - Hard Evidence

From: Eric Stevens (eric.stevens_at_sum.co.nz)
Date: 10/19/04 

Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 21:22:27 +1300

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 03:52:00 GMT, Joe Jefferson
<jjstrshp@mindspring.com> wrote:

>Eric Stevens wrote:
>>
>> The problem with saying that such things have never happened is that
>> statistics show that earth should experience a Tunguska-like event
>> about once a century on the average. Such
>> events have happened, about two thirds have happened at sea but there
>> should have been a number over inhabited land during historical times.
>> Analysis shows that there should also have been a number of events
>> similar to the one which created Lake Chiemsee. The apparent absence
>> of reports cannot be attributed to there being nothing to report.
>
>Eugene Shoemaker calculated that a Tunguska-like event should occur
>about once every three centuries, not once a century.

The statistics are being progressively sharpened since those days.
These estimates ae widely variable but the figure I quoted is from
Duncan Steele and is more in line with current data. I will try and
get back to you with a reference.

>So in roughly
>6,000 years of recorded history we should expect there have been about
>20 such impacts with no more than 6 or 7 hitting on land. For most of
>human history the majority of the Earth's surface was very sparsely
>populated. And even if somebody was in the right place to see something,
>chances are they didn't know how to write. The bottom line is that it
>wouldn't surprise me at all if Tunguska was the first event of this size
>ever to be noticed by people able to record what they had seen.

Gregory of Tours seems to have seen or heard of even more. Tunguska
didn't even make the surface.
>
>Interestingly, Shoemaker also estimated that meteors arrive about once a
>year with a force equivalent to about 20 kilotons of TNT. And yet these
>Hiroshima-size events are rarely reported outside the local area where
>they occur. (Admittedly the explosions generally occur very high in the
>atmosphere and, so far as I know, nobody has ever been hurt by one.)

Eric Stevens

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