Word: meteorically
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...aboard Zvezda will be sleeping much anyway, since the ship was built with so little noise muffling that the crew has to wear earplugs to shut out the din of onboard equipment. Then there's the temporary lack of shielding to protect the module from a rogue meteor hit--a potential calamity that could keep any astronaut awake at night...
...this kind of expected hydro-scarring. But a handful of the pictures took scientists by surprise. In general, the older a Martian formation is, the more likely it is to have been distorted over the eons--smoothed by the planet's periodic windstorms or gouged by the occasional incoming meteor. A few of the newly discovered water channels, however, look as fresh as the day they were formed, leading astonished researchers to conclude that that day may have been remarkably close to the present one. Says Weiler: "The water could have flowed perhaps a million years ago, perhaps...
Whisked off to an Edenic island by improbable circumstances, his abandoned egg hatches in the midst of a lemur band--grumpy papa, adoring mom, frisky siblings. His idyllic upbringing is interrupted by a meteor shower--prefiguring the extinction of the species perhaps 150,000 years later--that brings Aladar and his pals back to a barren mainland and the lad's struggle to assert the values of a new masculine style in a sere landscape where the dino herd is ruled by the cranky and politically incorrect Kron (Samuel E. Wright...
...fluctuation in daily temperature. Chunks of ice are breaking off the poles, leading to a rise in sea level. The burning of fossil fuels spews great pollution, making the air in some cities almost unbreathable. The current rate of species loss is unparalleled, except for the period after the meteor hit the Earth, killing off the dinosaurs. No one is calling Gore the savior of the Earth, but we will be calling ourselves fools if we continue to believe that nothing is going...
...want to get contemporary--on a geological scale, of course--it was only 49,000 years ago that an iron asteroid blasted out Arizona's three-quarter-mile-wide Meteor Crater, almost certainly killing any living creatures for hundreds of miles around. As recently as 1908, a small rocky asteroid or chunk of a comet exploded five miles above the Tunguska region of Siberia, felling trees, starting fires and killing wildlife over an area of more than 1,000 sq. mi. Had the blast, now estimated at tens of megatons, occurred over New York City or London, hundreds of thousands...