Starship Asterisk*

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070909.html

http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1 ... teors.html

Now who is digging for what information me wonders? FOCLMAO

cc,
What do you mean? You really have to be clearer than that!
What have large hailstones on Earth to do with this?
And for an ignorant one, 'FOCLMAO'?

But apart from that, I came to ask where are the "towering walls" to Odysseus that the APOD mentions? This crater is very large but is now a 'complex' crater that from its size and the material of Tethys has slumped, creating a central peak and circumferential terraces. Just how high are the walls now?

John

And for an ignorant one, 'FOCLMAO'?

http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/FOCLMAO
FOCLMAO Falling Off Chair Laughing My Ass Off

Jesus Martinez-Frias, a senior scientist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid ... found that the ice balls did not contain human excrement or the trademark blue disinfectant used in airplane toilets

Oh my god...this is priceless!!

Why?

JohnD wrote:Why?

Maybe he's inferring that the aforementioned iceballs have come all the way from Tethys...

Andy Wade wrote:

JohnD wrote:Why?

Maybe he's inferring that the aforementioned iceballs have come all the way from Tethys...

I take it, the "he's" you're refering to are the authors & editors Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA) "inferring that the aforementioned iceballs have come all the way from Tethys."

ROFLMAO

in orbit around Saturn as it swooped past the giant ice ball.

From the article, , duh, , FOCLMAO some more, ,

geeeeeeee JohnD you really should learn to RTFS

I really don't see what any of this has to do with the apod, but if you follow the link in the article about the 440 pound behemoth there's another amusing tidbit...

Spanish and American scientists were searching the sky for signs of megacryometeors, huge chunks of ice, weighing up to 440 pounds, that form in the atmosphere and fall to Earth. The strange ice meteors have been linked to global warming.14 The National Weather Service posted an urgent advisory to its website saying that "the Earth has left its orbit and is hurtling towards the sun."15

Global warming might be to blame:

So if glaciers melt it's global warming and if hailstones freeze that's global warming too. I'm really getting tired of this global warming nonsense.

(No objection to global warming, if any, only to the nonsense about it.)

SmartAZ wrote:

Global warming might be to blame:

So if glaciers melt it's global warming and if hailstones freeze that's global warming too. I'm really getting tired of this global warming nonsense.

(No objection to global warming, if any, only to the nonsense about it.)

In what way is that 'nonsense'? Glaciers are located at the surface of the Earth, where warming would be most severe. Hail forms in the upper troposphere, where it is quite cold, during severe weather. Global warming is predicted to increase the incidence of severe weather.

Not only that but wouldn't the greater temp differential caused between warmer global surface temps. and cold upper level atmosphere create stronger updrafts thereby causing larger iceballs to form?

Wow, I didn't expect to see the APOD forum using global warming as a catch-all explanation for every seemingly inexplicable occurrence too.

Hmm...so since the global average temperature has increased roughly 2/3 of a degree over the last hundred years, how big of a hailstone does that translate to. Would these things, had they been documented, be no larger than 415 pounds in 1907? Bah! That's tiny.

And how big would they have gotten during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, when the temperatures were probably around 10 degrees higher?