Chapter+13

=__**BANG!!!**__=

Section 1
In 1912 a man drilling a well for a town reported discovering a lot of strange rock. The rock was a piece of deformed rocks to some ancient, un specified volcanic action. The trauma to Manson's geology had come from 100 million miles beyond the earth. The crater was so big that it was bigger than the grand canyon. 2.5 million years of passing ice sheets filled the gigantic hole. At the library of Mansons the will happliey show you the collection of vewspaper articles and a box of samples, that were form a 1991-1992 drilling program. the biggest thing that has ever happend in Manson was a tornado on Main street in 1997. one of the upsides to a flatness is that you can see danger coming from a mile away. Four people were killed because thay were watching it for a half an hour and hoping that it would veer off but i didn't and they couldn't find shelter, and now every June, Manson has a week long event that was a way to help for get the unhappy event. Most people and most Iowans haven't ever heard of Manson's crater. Even to some geologists it barly ranks as a footnote. The amount of people that looks for astorides is fewer than McDonald's staff.

Section 2
__**Mystery Clay**__ by Frank

While Gene Shoemaker was galvanizing people about the potential danger of the inner solar system, a young geologist in Italy from the Lamont Doherty Laboratory at Columbia University. In the '70s, Walter Alvarez was doing field work in the Bottacione Gorge near Gubbio. Alvarez was curious about a band of reddish clay that divided two layers of limestone. One layer was from the Cretaceous Period. The other layer was from the Tertiary Period. This point is known as the KT boundary, and marks the time when the dinosaurs and other species died out. Alvarez wondered what it was about a thin lamina of clay, barely a quarter of an inch thick, that could account for such a dramatic moment in Earth's history. At the time everyone had the same idea about the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the thinness of the clay suggested that in Umbria, something more abrupt happened. In the 1970s no tests existed for determining how long such a deposit would take to accumulate. This might have suggested the theory that a meteor killed the dinosaurs. Nobody really knows what happened. Maybe nobody ever will. It might be one of life's greatest mysteries.



  clay layers.

Section 3
Geology is a profession that varies from place to place. A place like Iowa doesn't have much for land. It is mostly flat land, there are no mountains, glaciers, or deposits of oil, or precious metals, or jewels. If you were to work in Iowa as a geologist a big part of your work would have to do with the manure management plans that Iowa has. There are over 15 million hogs in Iowa. That’s a lot of manure. Now you can imagine how excited all the geologist were when in the mid-1980's the world's geological attention focused on on Manson and its crater. They drilled in the crater. The cost was $35 a foot. They needed funding, so they formed a collaboration with the Iowa Geological Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey. Then many people started to gather data about how Manson supposedly habituated dinosaurs. Upon further analysis it was discovered that Manson was not only too small, but nine million years too early. After even more analysis it was discovered that Manson's crater was not even a crater. Other scientist's and geologists joked that they "lost their crater." A few years later Alan Hildebrand of the University of Arizona, met with a reporter from the Houston Chronicle who knew about a big, unexplained ring formation 120 miles wide and 30 miles deep under the Yucatan. It was found by a Mexican oil company in 1952. They swiftly found in 1991 that Chicxulub was the impact site. 

Section 4
__Predicting Possible Armageddon__ by brandon

== In the event of an asteroid collision on Earth, Anderson believes we will have little or no warning at all. An asteroid or comet wouldn't be visible to the naked eye until one second to impact. It would take us by surprise unless someone were to see it with a telescope before hand. That is why NASA scientists are monitoring the positions of possible Earth-impacting objects. But if one of these objects were on a collision course with Earth, we wouldn't see it until six months t o impact. And scientists believe that is an insufficient amount of time to prepare for the effects of an asteroid collision. The scientists who research the possible effects say that the temperature below the asteroid would reach 60,000 kelvin. That is ten times hotter than the surface of the sun. Anything in its path would be burned instantly before it even struck Earth. Once it hit, every living thing within a 150 mile radius would be killed by the blast. Others outside the blast radius would be killed by the resulting fire or be sliced up by the flying bits of debris. Others who were not killed would be blinded by a bright light created by the blast. After the initial impact, other associated d angers would follow. But all we could do is guess on what will happen. Some scientists believe that a chain of earthquakes would occur. This would be followed by volcano eruptions and tsunamis. Most of the planet would be covered in fire, and blackness would fill the air a nd block sunlight from entering Earth. It is estimated that a billion and a half people would die the f irst day. Earth's ability to support life would be diminished, so many more deaths would soon follow. It is unlikely to accurately predict an asteroid or comet impact. There would be a huge margin for error, so we would never really know if an impact was certain, even with constant monitoring of near earth objects. Also Anderson says that impacts like the one at Mason occur every million years on average. We can't really determine humanity's ability to overcome such an event, but not one extinction occurred because of the Mason impact. There would be a lot of tension in the world if we had a warning that a comet or asteroid could hit us, but if it safely passed, imagine the excitement and the much greater appreciation we would have for our lives.