The day the earth exploded

• Autores: Stuart Clark
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2924, 2013, págs. 30-33
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Clark talks about planetary scientist Wim van Westrenen's idea that the Earth went through a cataclysms 4.5 billion years ago. With the paint barely dry on the new planet, a giant nuclear reactor deep in its interior went super-critical. The result was an atomic bomb with the force of 11,000 billion Tsars, enough to rip the world. This is a controversial idea, but there is circumstantial evidence, from traces of smaller "fossil reactors" deep underground in equatorial Africa to the conspicuous imbalance between the heat Earth gives out and the amount it receives from the sun. Among other things, Clark discusses van Westrenen's more audacious claim about the biggest piece of evidence for Earth's violent atomic past: the moon.