Verneshot
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A verneshot (named after French author Jules Verne) is a hypothetical volcanic eruption event which launches an extremely large rock into a sub-orbital trajectory.
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[edit] Connection with mass-extinctions
According to the Department of Marine Geodynamics at GeoMar, Kiel (Phipps Morgan et al.), verneshots are one possible cause for extinction level events.
The four major mass extinctions that may have been caused by verneshots are:
- The Frasnian-Fammian extinction event 364 million years ago, killing off 70% of all marine life, linked to the Siljan crater in Sweden and the Pripyat-Dniepr-Donetsk supervolcano in the Ukraine
- The Permian-Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago, killing off 96% of all life on the planet, linked to the Bedout crater off the coast of Australia and the supervolcano which formed the Siberian Traps
- The Triassic-Jurassic extinction event 200 million years ago, killing off 20% of species, linked to the Manicouagan crater in Canada and the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province supervolcano off the coast of Sierra Leone
- The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago, killing off 60% of species, linked to the Chicxulub crater in Mexico and the Deccan Traps supervolcano in India
The verneshot theory is that massive volcanic activity over thousands of square miles coincided with an impact event in the four cases described above. According to the theory, gas would seep up deep underground in an upwelling of magma like the hotspot which formed Hawaii but on a much larger scale. It would be trapped beneath impenetrable rock known as a craton (continental plate rock). As pressure built up, the gas would crack the craton and blast out at immense velocity. This gas would poison the atmosphere and cause a massive earthquake, enough to level mountain ranges.
The pipe through which the magma and gas had travelled would empty and collapse. A shockwave at hypersonic velocity would hit the remains of the craton and pulverise them with an explosion equivalent to 120 gigatons of TNT. Twenty billion tons of debris would be blasted into the atmosphere and lava would fill the hole left behind. The verneshot impactor (the largest lump hurled out) would then impact elsewhere on Earth.
The Chicxulub crater is consistent with such an event with the direction and low angle of impact. However, the velocity would be low compared to an extraterrestrial impactor, so the impactor would mostly survive and although it would be pulverised, it would not be vaporised. Finding rocks from Deccan in Mexico would validate this theory.
What this theory doesn't explain:
- The impact events are associated with layers of extraterrestrial material, such as the iridium of the KT event. This would need to be present in earth's mantle and there is little evidence to support that.
- The energy yield produced by verneshot scenario (about 100 gigatons of TNT) is far too low to create the Chicxulub crater. The energy is barely sufficient to eject mile-sized crust fragment with orbital velocity. A verneshot impactor of the discussed energy yield would do little more than a Nördlinger Ries crater.
- It is hard to believe that a chunk of the Earth's crust would survive the forces during an ejection without fragmentation. However, a verneshot could result in smaller impacts, but there would be dozens of them. No evidence of these has been found.
Revision of the scale of the verneshot theory may be necessary.
[edit] Smaller scale Verneshots
Less dramatic rock eruptions were documented in 2003 after a 1999 Earthquake in central Taiwan. It has also been argued that the Tunguska Event may have been caused by a Verneshot (Tunguska would have been the launchsite not the impact).
[edit] History
In 1865 Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon introduced the concept of a ballistic projectile escaping the Earth's gravity, from which Phipps Morgan et al. derived the name "Verneshot" in their paper theorizing cratonic gas ejection's connection to extinction events. This was in the projectile-naming tradition of John Hunter, whose 47 m expanding hydrogen gun, SHARP, is only a precursor to the "Jules Verne Launcher" with a 3,500 m barrel length, that was designed in the early 1990s for first-stage satellite launch.
[edit] Notes
↑ (15 January 2004), J. Phipps Morgan, T.J. Reston and C.R. Ranero, "Contemporaneous mass extinctions, continental flood basalts, and ‘impact signals’: are mantle plume-induced lithospheric gas explosions the causal link?", Earth and Planetary Science Letters. (First submitted 17 April 2003). For an informal introduction see Professor Jason Phipps Morgan's faculty biography at Cornell University from May 2004: "I became interested in the causes of mass-extinctions, in particular worrying about the 'too-many-coincidences' problem that these periods appear to be associated (if we believe what's published in the mainstream literature) with BOTH extremely rare continental flood basalts and continental rifting, and even rarer 'impact signals' commonly presumed to come from large extraterrestrial bolide impacts. Our recently published Verneshot hypothesis is our best guess on how to explain these coincidences in a self-consistent causal manner."
↑ 2004 M. Cirkovic and R.B. Cathcart, "Geo-Engineering Gone Awry: A New Partial Solution of Fermi’s Paradox", Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 57. (See Richard Cathcart's description in The Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight-section 4.) The article discusses naturally occurring Verneshot panspermia, and artificial Verneshot affecting humanity "adversly"). The probability of artificial Verneshots accidentally causing the End of civilization (resolving the Fermi Paradox) is not calculated.
↑ 2003 Huang et al., "Huge rock eruption caused by the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan", Geophysical Research Letters 30.
↑ See the 1994 Charlene Crabb New Scientist article about the "Jules Verne Launcher" (JVL): Shooting at the moon.
