A Hint of What is to Come?

Photo by Shawn Lockridge

“About 50,000 years ago a giant fireball streaked across the North American sky.  At its core was a meteorite–a chunk of nickel iron about 150 feet wide.

The meteorite weighed 300,000 tons and traveled at a speed of 26,000 miles per hour (12 kilometers per second). When it struck the earth in what is now northern Arizona, it exploded with the force of 2 ½ million tons of TNT, or about 150 times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Most of the meteorite was melted by the force of the impact, and spread across the landscape in a very fine, nearly atomized mist of molten metal. Millions of tons of limestone and sandstone were blasted out of the crater, covering the ground for a mile in every direction with a blanket of shattered, pulverized and partially melted rock mixed with fragments of meteoritic iron.

When the dust settled, what remained was a crater three-quarters of a mile (about 1 kilometer) wide and 750 feet deep.  The impact occurred during the last ice age, a time when the Arizona landscape was cooler and wetter than it is today. The plain around it was covered with a forest, where mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths grazed. The force of the impact would have leveled the forest for miles around, hurling the mammoths across the plain and killing or severely injuring any animals unfortunate enough to be nearby.”1

That’s me enjoying this amazing site.  Photo by Shawn Lockridge 

We were fortunate to visit the site of this meteor impact in August of this year.  It’s size is amazing–big enough to accommodate 20 football fields on its floor.  Later, contemplating the huge “impact” of this small-relatively speaking- chunk of nickel iron, we were struck with the amount of devastation that would accompany the impacts described in Revelation chapters 8 and 9.

The second angel blew his trumpet and something like a great mountain burning with fire, was thrown into the sea and a third of the sea became blood.  A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.  Rev. 8:8,9 ESV

The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water.  Rev. 8:10  ESV

I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth.  Rev. 9:1 ESV

These certainly sound like meteor impacts to me.  Whatever they describe, they will certainly happen.  They are promised in God’s Word, and the scripture cannot be broken.  John 10:35 ESV

(1)The Barringer Meteor Crater;  http://www.barringercrater.com/