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February 2 - February 12, 2020
Fish clean teeth
Where the astroid hit
The asteroid evaporated as it punched through the crust, leaving a crater almost two hundred kilometers across. Molten rocks were hurled into the air, where they formed dust clouds that blocked sunlight for many months. Limestone evaporated, spraying carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. An area hundreds of kilometers around the impact point was
stripped of life. Hundreds of kilometers beyond that zone, forests lit up in massive firestorms. At sea, a tsunami formed a wall of water that crashed down on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and killed fish and dinosaurs hundreds of kilometers away. In the Hell Creek Formation, in Montana and Wyoming, you can find fossils of fish whose gills are full of glass from the asteroid impact.22 Farther away, the immediate impacts were less extreme. But within weeks, the whole
Asteroid notes
In 1800, there were 900 million humans on Earth. By 1900, there were 1.5 billion. By 1950, when I was
a child, there were 2.5 billion humans, despite the huge casualties of the world wars. During my lifetime, human numbers have increased by another five billion. Such enormous numbers can numb the brain, so it’s worth taking the time to grasp what they mean. In the two hundred years since 1800, the number of humans increased by more than six billion.
How many people
The ultimate fate of planet Earth will be decided by the evolution of the sun. Our sun will live for about nine billion years.
Life of our sun
At about the time our sun goes rogue, our galaxy will collide with a neighboring
Galaxy
galaxy, the Andromeda.
Andromeda
This will be a sedate affair, like a crash between two clouds. But within each galaxy there will be a lot of turbulence as stars tug at one another in unpredictable ways. And the new, combined Milky Way/Andromeda galaxy will be a lot messier than the two beautiful spiral galaxies from which it was built.
Andromeda
