Friends may know the news that the Dart spacecraft launched by the American space agency NASA hit the asteroid Dyformos yesterday. NASA has prepared Dart to divert the Earth if any asteroid comes in the future causing a crisis. There have been few asteroid explosions on Earth to our knowledge. The most famous of these occurred six and a half million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs ruled the earth then.
On that day, an asteroid reached Earth from the outer boundary of the asteroid belt, which is located on the border between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids in this region are seen in dark color. The asteroid hit Chicxulub, a 145 km area in the Yucatan region of Mexico. Therefore, it is also called the Chicxulub asteroid. Not only the dinosaurs, but also three-quarters of the species on Earth at that time were destroyed by the events following the fall of this asteroid. There are various theories about how the destruction happened. The prevailing theory is that after the impact of the asteroid, a large amount of gases, smoke and dust with other debris rose in the atmosphere and the climate change caused by this may have paved the way for heavy damage. There are many who argue that the dinosaurs were not destroyed by an asteroid impact, but by a volcanic eruption.
In 1908, a huge asteroid explosion also happened in Tunguska, Siberia. Due to the sudden high temperature, around eight crore trees were stripped of their leaves and stood like telephone poles. A forest of such trees was created there. After 37 years, the world saw such a sight. When the US attacked the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki..
Podkam is a river in Siberia, Russia. The incident happened in a forest above this. In the area of the city of Tokyo, about five lakh acres of land were destroyed in this explosion. Many reindeer were also killed in the area. Rain is estimated to have caused an explosion of 20 megatons of TNT. A thousand times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
No one died as the area was sparsely populated. The locals also did not understand what was happening. The local people of Siberia believed that their god Ogdi had come. They didn’t say anything about it. In 1927, a Soviet scientist named Leonid Kulik made the first trip to Tunguska to unravel these mysteries. He reached the blast area and conducted inspections. He interacted with the locals who lived nearby and checked the fallen trees etc. In 2013, an asteroid also hit Chelyabinsk, Russia. 1600 people were injured in the power outage following the blast. Many buildings were damaged.
Content Summaery : What danger do asteroids pose to life on earth