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In the mid-1980s, a group of American archaeologists explored satellite images to try to understand what had happened to the Mayan civilization that once ruled the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and discovered a model: an almost perfect ring of sinkholes – cenotes – of about 200 km across, surrounding the capital of Yucatan, Merida, and the port cities of Sisal and Progreso. A pattern created by an ancient explosion of asteroids that can give clues to the ocean and the atmosphere lost from Mars.
At the scientific conference in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1988, when researchers presented their findings to a public scientist, Adriana Ocampo, NASA's then global planetary geologist, the circular formation not only saw a huge ring , it has an impact crater of an asteroid that hit with the force of 10 billion nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and that left traces hidden on the planet 66 million years still. Today, the center of the bubble is a place buried one kilometer below a small town called Chicxulub Puerto.
"As soon as I saw the slides, it was my moment" Aha! ". Ocampo, now director of NASA's Lucy mission, will send a spacecraft into Jupiter's orbit in 2021, told BBC Ocampo. "I was really excited inside but I stayed calm because obviously, you will not know until you have more evidence. They did not even know what I was talking about! She laughed three decades later.
The key to his' Aha! This moment was an intuition she had learned after working with Eugene Shoemaker, legendary figure of space science, the pioneering American geologist who, as the founder of the field of planetary science, remained 21 years after his death. Only person whose ashes are buried on the moon – had informed Ocampo that it was unlikely that circles close to perfection were caused by other land forces and could provide clues to the geological development of Earth.
The accidental meeting of Ocampo was the beginning of a scientific correspondence that would have laid the foundation for what most scientists believe today: this ring corresponds to the edge of the crater caused by an asteroid described by Peter Brannen in The End of the World as follows: "The asteroid itself was so big that even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still dominated at over One kilometer above the cruise altitude of a 747. In its almost instantaneous descent, it was compressing the air underneath so violently it briefly became several times hotter than the surface from the sun, striking the Earth with enough force to bring a mountain back into space at the speed of exit.
"Impact!" The asteroid that was crossing a mile above the cruise altitude of a 747
According to the BBC, in the years following the cataclysmic impact, the Earth would have completely changed, the ash plume blocking the sky creating a perpetual night for more than a year, plunging temperatures below frost and destroying 75% of all life on Earth – including almost all dinosaurs.
Scientists explored the Chicxulub Crater buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula and recovered rocks beneath the Gulf of Mexico that had been affected by the asteroid, creating a niche that made possible the rise of the Homo sapiens. The 15 km wide asteroid could not have reached a worse place on Earth. "All these fossils are in a layer not more than 10 cm thick," said paleontologist Ken Lacovara. "They died suddenly and were buried quickly. This tells us that it is a geological moment. It's days, weeks, even months. But these are not thousands of years old; it's not hundreds of thousands of years. It's essentially an instant event.
Without this impact, humanity may never have existed. "It gave us a boost so we could compete, thrive, as we finally did," she said.
"Lost!". How the old ocean of Mars disappeared into space (WATCH's "Galaxy" stream today)
Debris discovered as a result of asteroid impacts on Mars, compared to ejecta from the Chicxulub Crater, have similarities that indicate that Mars has already had a much thicker atmosphere than today. hui, an atmosphere closer to life on Earth. "It's important for us to know what has happened in the past to be prepared for the future," Ocampo said. "It provides a very good overview of what happened in the geological evolution of Mars."
"It's a natural laboratory because of its similarities to what we can find on other planets like Mars where humans can not go," Ocampo said of Mexico's smallest crater.
Today, Mars is a glacial desert world with a carbon dioxide atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth. But the evidence suggests that in the early days of our solar system, the surface of Mars probably hosted an ocean as deep as the Mediterranean Sea. However, as the planet's atmosphere cleared, most of the ocean was lost in space. The rest of the water is enclosed in the Martian ice caps.
Astronomers from UC Santa Cruz, Caltech and MIT proposed that a giant meteorite or comet the size of Pluto, over 1,200 miles in diameter – was heading back to the old Mars at 21,600 miles to hour, crushing on a steep slope of the planet about 3.9 billion years ago, the huge elliptical scar of 5,300 miles was swept away and now forms all the lowlands of the north of the planet, while leaving the southern uplands relatively intact. An impact so important that it left half of the red planet at a lower altitude.
If theories are correct, it has exploded the largest crater that any planet has ever survived. It was a much larger convulsion than the one that drove the dinosaurs to extinction on Earth. One of the areas of the surface is the huge oval scar of the impact itself, which covers more than a third of the Martian surface and encompasses all the vast expanses of plain of the far north of the planet, where the Phoenix probe is digging up buried nuggets. of ice. The other is the even larger mountainous area to the south, marked by deep canyons, high mountains and remnants of giant volcanoes.
Discovery of Mars – Huge liquid water lake observed under the South Pole: "We did not see what was happening under our nose"
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor from NASA provided detailed information on the altitudes and gravity of the northern and southern hemispheres of the Red Planet. The mystery of the two-sided nature of Mars has puzzled scientists since the first complete images of the surface were transmitted to Earth by NASA in the 1970s. According to the new analysis, a giant north basin covering about 40 % of the surface of Mars, sometimes called the Borealis Basin, is the remnant of a colossal impact at the beginning of the formation of the solar system. With its 8,500 kilometers (5,300 miles) wide, it is about four times wider than the next known impact basin, the Hellas Basin, in the south of Mars.
"Colliding Worlds" – Why is the north of Mars lower in altitude than the south of Mars?
An accompanying report calculated that the object that produced the Borealis Basin had traveled approximately 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles). It's bigger than Pluto. It seems to have held an ocean in a crater the size of the combined regions of Asia, Europe, and Australia, at the beginning of the planet, before Mars lost so much part of its atmosphere and that the water is sublimated or frozen below the surface.
The information provided by Chicxulub could also give clues about the possible presence of water on the surface of Mars long after the planet was damaged by the huge blow hit by an asteroid.
Scientists have detected frozen water on the surface of the red planet. The Martian seas may have disappeared when the planet was bombarded by small meteors that changed its atmosphere and dried it, said Ocampo.
The Daily Galaxy via the BBC http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181111-the-buried-secrets-of-the-deadliest-location-on-earth and https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/ people / 1780 / adriana-ocampo /
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