Giant asteroid narrowly missing earth...

A giant asteroid will only just miss earth later this year, according to NASA.

The huge rock, dubbed YU55, will pass within 201,700 miles of our planet in November.

If it crashes into earth the impact would be equivalent to 65,000 atomic bombs, while the crater would be six miles wide and 2,000 ft deep.

The asteroid, which weighs 55 million tons and is 1,300ft wide, will be the largest ever object to get so close to our planet. It orbits the sun every 14 months.

It will be closer to us than the moon, which is on average 238,855 miles away and will be visible through a small telescope.

The best times to view it will be between 23:28 on 8 November and 07:13 on 9 November (UK time).

According to NASA spokesman Dave Yeomans, there is no chance YU55 will crash into earth… for the time being. He said in statement: “YU55 poses no threat of an Earth collision over, at the very least, the next 100 years.”

He added: “During its closest approach, its gravitational effect on the Earth will be so minuscule as to be immeasurable. It will not affect the tides or anything else.”

Nonetheless, it has been officially labeled a ‘potentially hazardous object’ by the space agency.

YU55 was discovered by Robert McMillan, head of the NASA-funded Spacewatch Program at the University of Arizona in 2005, but it’s not the only ‘near-earth object’ they are monitoring.

NASA are also keeping tabs on WN5, an asteroid that will pass the planet in 2028, and ‘99942 Apophis’, a celestial body measuring 1,200 ft which could zhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifoom past us on April 13 2036.

They also believe an even bigger asteroid has a one-in-a-thousand chance of colliding with earth in 2182.

- The original article is from Yahoo! News.

Supercontinent by Ted Nield

Just finished reading this book. Picked it up in a bookstore after the earthquake in Italy April 2009.

Great book to get you started to know about everything you want to know about how the earth evolves over thousands, millions, billions of years. Nield describes the evolution of the earth from the beginning, about 4.7 billion years ago. How geologists and anthropologists interpret fossil, sedimentary and other evidences to see what has happened in the past. How the continents were built and evolved into different formations over millions of years. How oceans and mountains are built over thousands of years in the same processes that cause earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes.

Evidences on early life suggests that simple single-celled life started around 4.4 billion years ago, but did not evolve into complex life until about half a billion years ago. Dominant life before this time, known as the Precambrian time, were mostly algae-like forms living for about a billion years or so. But changes in the continent distribution from separated islands into one large mass called Rodinia situated in the equator changed the earth atmosphere and transformed earth into a large snowball of ice.

Here's more on this book on Amazon:

To understand continental drift and plate tectonics, the shifting and collisions that make and unmake continents, requires a long view. The Earth, after all, is 4.6 billion years old. This book extends our vision to take in the greatest geological cycle of all—one so vast that our species will probably be extinct long before the current one ends in about 250 million years. And yet this cycle, the grandest pattern in Nature, may well be the fundamental reason our species—or any complex life at all—exists.

This book explores the Supercontinent Cycle from scientists' earliest inkling of the phenomenon to the geological discoveries of today—and from the most recent fusing of all of Earth's landmasses, Pangaea, on which dinosaurs evolved, to the next. Chronicling a 500-million-year cycle, Ted Nield introduces readers to some of the most exciting science of our time. He describes how, long before plate tectonics were understood, geologists first guessed at these vanishing landmasses and came to appreciate the significance of the fusing and fragmenting of supercontinents.

He also uses the story of the supercontinents to consider how scientific ideas develop, and how they sometimes escape the confines of science. Nield takes the example of the recent Indian Ocean tsunami to explain how the whole endeavor of science is itself a supercontinent, whose usefulness in saving human lives, and life on Earth, depends crucially on a freedom to explore the unknown.

He ended the book with a description on the Indonesian earthquake 26 December 2004 that created the tsunami around the Indian ocean.