Bill Bryson-BANG

The chapter first talks about Manson, Iowa and the Manson crater. People knew for a long time that there was something odd about the earth beneath Manson, Iowa. In 1912 a man by the name of Manson dug a well drilling for water, when he discovered a strangely deformed rock. (crystalline clast breccia with a melt matrix and overturned ejecta flap). In 1953 geologists agreed that the rocks were formed by a unspecified volcanic eruption. Where Manson now stands has become a hole 3 miles deep and more than 20 miles across. Unfortunately, after 2.5 million years of passing, ice sheets filled the crater of Manson. This is why not many people of heard of the Manson crater. Every June now Manson has a week-long event called Crater Days, to help people forget a unhappy anniversary of a tornado that hit Main street that killed many people.

The chapter then talks about asteroids. Asteroids are rocky objects orbiting in loose formation in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. As of July 2001, 26,000 asteroids had been named and identified. With up to a billion to identify the count has barely begun.

In 1985, two geologists by the names of Anderson and Witzke, went to an annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union where two scientists, Izett and C.L. Pillmore of the US Geological Survey announced that the Manson crater was the right age to have been involved with the dinosaurs extinction. Unfortunately, a more careful examination of the data was revealed that Manson was not only to small but also 9 million years too early. Since this happened Anderson and Witzke no longer had the crater that made the dinosaurs extinct.

If a asteroid or comet travelling at cosmic velocities it would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, like a bicycle pump. Since compressed air grows swiftly hot and the temperature would rise below it, when it enters the atmosphere everything in the meteor’s path would just crinkle or vanish. People up to 1500 km away would be knocked off their feet or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond 1500 km the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that's just the initial shock wave. The impact would set off earthquakes, cause volcanoes to erupt, tsunamis would rise and within an hour a cloud of blackness would cover the Earth and burning rock and debris would be pelting down everywhere. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead just after the first day. If we managed to get a warhead to the asteroid it would turn into a string of rocks that would slam into us one after the other.

The good news is that it appears to take an awful lot to extinguish a species. The bad news is that the good news can never be counted on. We shouldn't be looking at space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see. Earth can provide plenty of danger of it’s own.