Word: earthed
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...Google Earth Takes On the Prado's Masterworks
...Last month, the news was filled with headlines about a large asteroid which might hit the Earth in 2036. Apophis, as it is called, is 390 meters wide. If it strikes the planet, it would release more than 100,000 times the energy than that of the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. The asteroid was a big story, but buried deep in the press reports about it was the fact that the odds of a collision are 1 in 5,500 based on current information...
When a scientific principle is common knowledge even in grammar school, you know it has long since crossed the line from theory to established fact. That's the case with dinosaur extinction. Some 65 million years ago - as we've all come to know - an asteroid struck the earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals. The suddenness with which so many species vanished after that time always suggested a single cataclysmic event, and the 1978 discovery...
...have been simultaneous, instead occurring 300,000 years apart. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's a relevant eyeblink all the same - one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to send the extinction theory entirely awry. (See pictures of meteors striking the earth...
...with killing the dinosaurs, after all, left more than the Chicxulub crater as its calling card. At the same 65-million-year depth, the geologic record reveals that a thin layer of iridium was deposited pretty much everywhere in the world. Iridium is an element that's rare on Earth but common in asteroids, and a fine global dusting of the stuff is precisely what you'd expect to find if an asteroid struck the ground, vaporized on impact and eventually rained its remains back down. Below that iridium layer, the fossil record shows that a riot of species...