Tea at Trianon: Asteroid Dust

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, April 9, 2021

Asteroid Dust

From EarthSky:

In February 2021 scientists announced the discovery of asteroid dust in the Yucatan’s famous Chicxulub crater, which has been linked for years to the dinosaurs’ extinction 66 million years ago. The scientists examined rock cores taken from the crater. They found iridium, a telltale element – rare on Earth – but abundant in certain asteroids. In the 1980s, a spike in iridium found in geologic layers across Earth led to the hypothesis that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. In the 1990s, scientists found Chicxulub crater, off the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, and heralded it as a possible impact site. Now, scientists have found iridium in portions of Chicxulub crater itself. That discovery “seals the deal,” these researchers said.

Sean Gulick of University of Texas at Austin co-led the 2016 expedition to the Chicxulub crater with Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London. The expedition extracted nearly 3,000 feet (914 meters) of rock cores from the crater under the seafloor. Analyses of these rock cores led to the iridium discovery. Gulick said:

We are now at the level of coincidence that geologically doesn’t happen without causation. It puts to bed any doubts that the iridium anomaly [in the geologic layer] is not related to the Chicxulub crater.
(Read more.)