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Massive asteroid impact in 2036?

The moon has thousands and thousands of craters. Some of them gigantic.

I wonder...why is that?

Well, the moon lacks an atmosphere to protect it from impacts. It also lacks the complex geology, weather, water, and other forces that erode the signs of craters over the centuries.

Given enough time, impacts are inevitable; that does not mean that this impact is inevitable. Far from it.
 
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a 200-yard wide asteroid impact will be like a sizable nuclear detonation.

and if it hits the ocean, it would create a massive tsunami that could drown/kill millions across the globe.

No, it would not. I'm getting really tired of the people who have in the last ten years just discovered tsunamis and decide that the end of the world was going to happen from a wave; they're the same people who just discovered that caldera super-volcanos and have decided Yellowstone's getting ready to blow.

To create a large tsunami you have to couple energy from the event into energy in the deep ocean. The dynamics of the deep ocean are at very low resonant frequencies, with a period on the order of many seconds, perhaps as much as a minute. The things that really excite the ocean are events that happen on that frequency. Earthquakes under the ocean often cause one-way shifting of huge blocks of rock some meters up or down; under the ocean that means either a drop or a rise of such a block, permanently displacing an equivalent amount of water. That displacement is permanent, so the ocean has to compensate by moving cubic kilometers of water kilometers within minutes; that causes a tsunami. What doesn't cause a significant tsunami in the open ocean is something fast and transient, like a landslide, or a small asteroid.

An asteroid like that would more likely act by essentially drilling a hole through the ocean. What happened at the bottom would be key; if it triggered an earthquake that moves blocks, that could cause a tsunami; if it simply disintegrated against the rock, probably not much. What, for example, is the volume of the Barringer crater? About .2 cu km; not very impressive compared to even a moderate underwater earthquake. A larger meteor is different, as its energy evacuates a huge volume of water.

Now granted, I'm using an analogy from engineering about energy coupling that was semi-instinctual in my practice of engineering; no one has witnessed any huge landscape or small (OP sized, anyway) meteor landing on a deep ocean, so what I have here is mainly feelings. But try this: drop a rock into a pond (not a puddle) and witness the waves. Then take another rock of the same size and throw it down into the pond with as much velocity as you can. Describe the differences in terms of the waves, say, 5 meters away from impact; did it create waves of a size commensurate with all the extra energy you pumped into it?

Another example: the Crossroads Baker nuclear test occurred inside the lagoon of the Bikini atoll, about 3 km from the shore. The floor of the lagoon was about 54 meters down; the blast was 21 KT. The explosion excavated a 300 meter bubble in the water, most of which came back down from the blast column within a minute. The train of nine waves on the shore 3 km away measured about 2 meters high at maximum. That was a huge fast energy transfer on a shallow pond, and even there the waves created were relatively negligible.
 
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a large asteroid plunging into the ocean at 10,000 mphs creates a vast void in ocean in an instant. this would created massive wave as water moved inward to fill the void. that massive amount of water then moves backwards..and would spread across the ocean.

am I wrong?



drop a large rock rock in a swimming pool and see what happens. the same thing would happen with an asteroid impact.
 
Ok, question time for all the atronomers on the forums.

Why can't we predict whether or not it will hit us? If it swings past every seven years, doesn't that provide more than enough data for us to determine its orbit?

Mainly because it is in roughly Earth orbit and is subject to a lot of perturbations from Venus, Mars, Jupiter and other asteroids. The close encounters to Earth in particular have a big influence on where it goes in the future, and are highly sensitive to exact distances. A couple of yards nearer or farther from Earth at closest approach has a large result a year later. This sensitivity is the basis of chaos theory; you're just seeing the edge of that in the orbit calculations.

A secondary problem, coupled with the first, is that one needs at least three "fixes" on a body to compute an orbit. The errors are lowest when these fixes are done farthest apart. When such a meteor is first located, three fixes on three nights are not very far along the orbit, so the errors are high. Now that we have observed a full orbit, the orbit is much better determined.
 
I'm much more concerned about comets coming out of nowhere giving us very little time.
 
a large asteroid plunging into the ocean at 10,000 mphs creates a vast void in ocean in an instant. this would created massive wave as water moved inward to fill the void. that massive amount of water then moves backwards..and would spread across the ocean.

am I wrong?

drop a large rock rock in a swimming pool and see what happens. the same thing would happen with an asteroid impact.

How large is large? a couple hundred yards? Six miles (like the Chicxulub event)? I didn't say it wouldn't be catastrophic; just that tsunamis are the least of your worries.

One other thing, that I glossed over a bit. The waves that create tsunamis are not the surface waves, they are the deep ocean waves that shift the entire volume of the water a few meters laterally; technically, Rayleigh waves. Out at sea tsunami waves are negligible; it is only as they near shore that the energy is focused on an ever decreasing volume of water. These deep waves aren't created by transient media; they're the ones created by blocks of ocean bottom hundreds of km in surface area moving up or down a few meters, creating tens of cu km of permanent displacement.
 
I'm much more concerned about comets coming out of nowhere giving us very little time.

Amen. That is the real worry. We could have every meteor down to a foot long in near Earth orbit mapped to a far-the-well, and a high eccentricity comet is still a hazard, particularly as they come at us at much higher velociites than the NEAs do.
 
Ok, question time for all the atronomers on the forums.

Why can't we predict whether or not it will hit us? If it swings past every seven years, doesn't that provide more than enough data for us to determine its orbit?

We can predict it, but - as with all scientific measurements - our measurements & calculations always include some inherent uncertainty; think about making a measurement of length with a ruler - at some point you have to estimate the measurement, and at that point your uncertainty enters the equation. That means that, depending upon the amount of uncertainty, we can make more or less accurate predictions. In the case of Apophis, our current measurements (including uncertainty) of its orbit indicate that it has about a 1-in-250,000 chance of impacting Earth in 2036. As we get more and more updated information, that number could easily be revised.
 
and if it hits the ocean, it would create a massive tsunami that could drown/kill millions across the globe.

When I first read this post, I read, "It would create a massive tsunami that could drown/kill morons across the globe," and thought, "How is that bad?"
 
MAybe it could land in Yellowstone right before the caldera is about to blow and save us.
 
So, basically all the worst parts of the bible?


According to Genesis God made a covenant with Noah, promising to never again destroy the world by flooding. In the Apocalypse reference is made to meteor showers but no danger is attached to these displays. IIRC, man's existence on Earth is ended by war, not natural disaster.

Been a while since I read it though.
 
That's a very good question and deserves an answer.

I think the reason is that a close encounter between two bodies alters their orbits, and where you have a relatively small object and a large one, the orbit of the smaller one can be altered a lot. So after one close approach, the small body may be deflected to an orbit that is more likely to hit the Earth, or alternatively an orbit less likely to hit the Earth. It may be a matter of a few km as to which option actually occurs.

It just seems to be that if we can get enough data on an asteroid to get a satellite in orbit around it, we should be able to tell if it's gonna land in someone's backyard, ya know?
 
@patchbunny: Yeah, but I can drive across the USA from the east coast to the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in California no problem. I get to make corrections along the way. Shooting a ball from my house to that address is another issue entirely.
 
a 200-yard wide asteroid impact will be like a sizable nuclear detonation.

and if it hits the ocean, it would create a massive tsunami that could drown/kill millions across the globe.



Unlikely. Water-blast nuclear detonations don't release remotely enough force to generate a tsunami, let alone a dangerous one. Even large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (which release many orders of magnitude more energy than even the very largest nuclear weapons) only produce tsunamis that kill people in the immediate vicinity.

If a 200-yard wide asteroid hit the earth in the oceans we'd probably not even notice.
 
If a 200-yard wide asteroid hit the earth in the oceans we'd probably not even notice.

I'm no expert, but check this site. http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=45


There were several events that were unusually deadly -- a matter of bad luck for 54 million people:
136th Millennium: A 200-yard-wide asteroid hits the South China Sea just 300 miles from Hong Kong. A 40-yard-high tsunami sweeps the coast and kills 18 million people.
20th Millennium: An asteroid just 70 yards across explodes in the skies 14 miles above London. 10 million are killed in the 80-megaton blast and firestorm.
273rd Millennium: A 50-yard-wide comet travelling at an unusually fast 150,000 mph explodes in the atmosphere 25 miles above Mexico City. 14 million are killed by the 110-megaton blast and firestorm. 721st Millennium: An almost identical event occurs over Manila, killing 12 million.
 
a large asteroid plunging into the ocean at 10,000 mphs creates a vast void in ocean in an instant. this would created massive wave as water moved inward to fill the void. that massive amount of water then moves backwards..and would spread across the ocean.

am I wrong?



drop a large rock rock in a swimming pool and see what happens. the same thing would happen with an asteroid impact.



You're not wrong, but the issues comes down to what constitutes a "large" asteroid. 200 yards across, as mentioned in your first post, is not a large body, and certainly not large enough to generate a Tsunami.

A large collision event is considered any object 5km across or larger, and these occur approximately once every ten million years.

Objects 50m across or larger are more common - once every thousand years - and would produce something like the Tunguska impact event, which had a yield comparable to 1/3 the size of the largest nuclear detonation in history.

If we compare with, say earthquakes, a M8 earthquake releases about the same amount of energy, yet on average such size earthquakes occur once a year.

In other words we experience an event comparable to your alleged "wipe out millions of people" impact event every single year, noticeably without millions of people being wiped out.

The Boxing Day earthquake, which was located very close to coastal areas (maximizing the damage), produced a 10m high Tsunami that killed about 230,000 people, and that released 1.34 gigatons - almost 100 times the size of the Tunguska impact event.

If we suffered an impact event large enough to cause the sort of Tsunamis you're talking about, we'd be talking about a massive, massive impact, and tsunamis would be the very least of our worries.
 

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