Re: iridium

[Bihari Gabor fiz5 9711 <biharig@dragon.klte.hu>]

On Tue, 12 May 1998, Bihari Gabor wrote:

> Poor guy. That is about 10-100 tons of iridium.

Sorry, I forgot a "thousand" from the number.
That is cca. 10-100 thousand tons.


> On Sun, 10 May 1998, Earl Wood wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > James R. Cunningham wrote:
> > 
> > > > At 08:28 PM 5/6/98 -0700, Earl Wood wrote:
> > > > >     I would like to know if anyone has calculated the amount of 
> > > > > Iridium
> > > > >needed to
> > > > >cover the entire earths surface , at the depth associated with the K C
> > > > >boundary ? and if so does anyone have these figures , or a reference
> > > > >that would be available to Joe citizen ?
> > >
> > > This is from memory, so is untrustworthy.  I believe I read some years
> > > ago that assuming iridium concentrations typical of other meteors, it
> > > would have taken an asteroid about 5-8 miles in diameter to contain the
> > > iridium needed to match measured amounts at the K-T boundary.
> > >                         Best wishes,
> > >                                 Jim
> > 
> >      In my efforts to find the answer to this question , I looked at the
> > Alvarez work on this question and their figures state.......common 
> > meteorites
> > have iridium of about 500 parts per billion, they calculated that the world
> > wide iridium anomaly at about ( 0.5 million tons)to introduce that much 
> > iridium
> > would require a meteorite 10 kilometers in diameter ,
> > slightly larger than the nucleus of Halley's comet . This was taken from 
> > their
> > paper in
> > Science magazine.  Just a refresher in case you are interested. Thanks for 
> > your
> > post
> > I really appreciate any help I can Get..
> >      Earl Wood
> >      candles@jps.net
> > 
> > 
> > 
>