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Two Billion craters on Mars

29 March 2024
Astronomy, Catastrophism, Geology

At https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/single-enormous-object-left-2-billion-craters-on-mars-scientists-discover/ … an object slammed into Mars 2.3 million years ago and created two billion small craters around the main impact site. The main crater is 87 miles in diameter. A big hit, then. Currently, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been recording the pock marked landscape. This was formed by fragments splintering off and shooting outwards.

At https://www.iflscience.com/historys-biggest-solar-storm-the-carrington-event-was-even-bigger-than-we-realized-73527 …. It seems a re-analysis of the data has led to the discovery that the Earth’s magnetic field was as badly affected as solar observers said at the time. We are talking about the Carrington Event of 1859. Scientists in the 20th century considered the 19th century calculations had been over egged. The new research suggests they should not have adopted such a disparaging stance – belittling scientists of the 19th century. They may not have had the benefit of studying the subject at a univerity but it seems they had been right all along and modern scientists had overstepped their scepticism. At the time, Greenwich and Kew observatories had magnetograms that measured fluctuations in the strength and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. Carrington made the connection between a solar storm he witnessed on the face of the Sun and the subsequent response at the surface of the Earth. Indeed, two years after the Carrington Event a scientific paper  estimated its strength based on the same, or similar, data. They came to a conclusion very close  to the modern research – and modeling. However, their contemporaries, as well as astronomers of the 20th century, considered they had overstated the strength – a rate of  change amounting to 500 nanotesla per minute. You can download the pdf of the research paper via the link provided. See https://doi.org/10.1029/2023SW003807

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