“So the first thing is the radiation from the fireball, which is so hot, it’s mostly optical, but then you get the ejecta arriving.” A phenomenal amount of earth was excavated from the crater. This was the ejecta, so named for its literal ejection into orbit. Loosed from the surly bonds of earth for a moment, the rock followed intercontinental ballistic trajectories to the far reaches of the globe. When it returned, it burned up in the atmosphere in a worldwide blizzard of meteorites. This is one of the mechanisms that provides the asteroid theory its globally lethal thrust. “It covered the
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