Dirk Pitt Revealed by Clive Cussler

Author:Clive Cussler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-05-17T19:13:53+00:00

By

Clive Cussler

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Impact

6120 B.C.

In what is now Hudson's Bay, Canada The intruder came from beyond. A nebulous celestial body as old as the universe itself, it had been born in a vast cloud of ice, rocks, dust and gas when the outer planets of the solar system were formed more than four and a half billion years ago. Soon after its scattered particles froze into a solid mass one mile in diameter, it began streaking silently through the emptiness of space on an orbital voyage that carried it around a distant sun and halfway to the nearest stars again, a journey lasting two million years from start to finish.

The comet's core, or nucleus, was a conglomeration of frozen water, carbon monoxide, methane gas and jagged blocks of metallic rocks. It might accurately be described as a dirty snowball hurled through space by the hand of God. But as it whirled past the sun and swung around on its return path beyond the outer reaches of the solar system, the solar radiation reacted with its nucleus and a metamorphosis took place. The ugly duckling soon became a thing of beauty.

As it began to absorb the sun's heat and ultraviolet light, a long coma formed that slowly grew into an enormous, luminous blue tail that curved and stretched out behind the nucleus for a distance of ninety million miles. A shorter, white dust tail more than one million miles wide also materialized and curled out on the sides of the larger tail like the fins of a fish.

Each time the comet passed the sun, it lost more of its ice, and its nucleus diminished. Eventually, in another two hundred million years, it would lose all its ice and break up into a cloud of dust and become a series of small asteroids. This comet, however, would never orbit outside the solar system or pass around the sun again. It would not be allowed a slow, cold death far out in the blackness of space.

Within a few short minutes, its life would be snuffed out. On this, its last orbit, the comet passed within nine hundred thousand miles of Jupiter, whose great gravitational force made it veer off on a collision course with the third planet from the sun, a planet its inhabitants called Earth.

Plunging into the Earth's atmosphere at one hundred twenty thousand miles an hour on a forty-five-degree angle, its speed ever increasing with the gravitational pull, the comet created a brilliant luminescent bow shock as its two-billion-ton mass began to break into fragments due to friction from its great speed.

Seven seconds later, the misshapen comet, having become a blinding fireball, smashed into an ocean Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

with horrendous effect. The immediate result from the explosive release of kinetic energy upon impact was to gouge out a massive cavity the size of today's Hawaiian island of Maui as it vaporized and displaced a gigantic volume of water.

The entire Earth staggered from the seismic shock of an 11.

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