It's 1998, and Earth is in between a 6-mile-wide space rock and a hard place.
Thankfully, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and his roughneck gang of drillers have volunteered to hitch rides on two space shuttles to save your sorry behind from approaching doom.
If you have good taste in painfully bad movies, you know we're on set of the sci-fi action movie Armageddon. For the rest of this post to work, however, we need to negate the happy ending where Willis' character saves humanity by staying on the asteroid to manually detonate a nuclear warhead. (Hey, the movie came out a decade ago -- so you can take your spoiler alert and shove it where the sun don't shine!)
Actually, let's just forget about the entire movie.
As Phil Plait has famously pointed out, it's a complete load of junk. But now that you're thinking asteroid + Earth = bad, check out Chris Lintott's latest post.
Found at Down2Earth.eu, a site run by Cardiff University's Ed Gomez, the asteroid impact calculator is quite possibly one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Making it cool, of course, is that it's based on real science -- that of Robert Marcus, H. Jay Melosh and Gareth Collins.
Here's a scientifically accurate (and horribly frightening) scenario I constructed for you using the tool:
It's late summer afternoon on a Saturday, and it's time to relax.
You're 75 miles out on New York's Long Island -- Southampton, to be precise -- having a fine time drinking fancy-schmancy cocktails and chowing down some barbecued food with friends at some lush estate. Feeling a wee bit tipsy and seeking to catch some rays, you recline into a chair.
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All of the sudden, you happen to catch a glimpse of a 4-mile-wide fireball screaming across the sky at 84,000 miles per hour (that's five times faster than a space shuttle at top speed). It's headed directly for New York City.
Moments later, a sonic boom about as loud as a wood chipper rattles windows and further freaks out of your guests.
Moments after that, the brightest light you've ever seen ignites on the western horizon for roughly nine seconds, giving you an instant sunburn. Some of your party goers gazed directly at it too long, and are now permanently blinded. As people scream and shout for about ten seconds after that, the ground shakes with a 6 to 7 magnitude earthquake.
Ok, you're still alive and the house is still standing as everyone around you cries bloody murder. But you, you're smart... You know the worst isn't over.
You try and tell everyone to get away from the house and trees -- or anything that's tall -- and plug their ears. Because in about five to six minutes, the airborne shockwave is going to arrive.
When it does, the windows blast into smithereens, about 1/3 of the trees fall over, and others lose a shocking amount of leaves and branches. Your reclining lawnchair can be found a few dozen feet away.
---
Sooner or later, the reports come in from places that are alive to report anything at all.
Scientists say an asteroid 1,300 feet wide -- about as big as the Empire State Building is tall -- slammed into the East River, turning most of New York City into a crater about 5.5 miles wide.
The hole in the ground is 1/3 of a mile deep, and anything within a couple miles of the impact zone was vaporized into soot, or buried under a mound of debris 10 feet thick.
Parts of the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn closest to the site are utterly destroyed -- and so is Newark, New Jersey. Trees lit on fire and buildings were reduced to rubble, and there are no survivors.
In areas a few miles farther away, most of the buildings are collapsed or badly damaged. Grass and newspapers were set afire, and nearly all the trees blown down or stripped bare of leaves.
Swimmers at Long Beach, just 17 miles away, are covered in third-degree burns.
My point is not to be a doom-and-gloom guy here; it is to show real science applied in a cool and informative way. According to this nifty tool, the above is a realistic portrait of what could happen. And about every 128,000 years.
At right, is what my scenario looked like in the tool. I picked a porous rock, but you have some other options.
If we change the density to that of a 400-meter hunk of iron:
- the fireball is nearly 7.5 miles wide
- the crater is 11 miles wide
- you could double your distance away and still encounter my Southampton scenario (everything about ~100 miles away is rubble)
- happens every 465,000 years
If we change it to a 400-meter chunk of ice:
- the fireball is 3.5 miles wide
- the crater is 3.5 miles wide
- you could be 15-20 miles closer before encountering my Southampton scenario
- happens every 94,000 years
Perhaps surprising is that in all cases, the crater depth is about the same -- whodathunk it!
I'd love to supply you with all sorts of facts and figures about real-world examples, but it's way funner to play with this tool. That being said...
Go ahead construct your own disaster scenario we might be able to avoid if we provide more funding to pay attention to the sky... (That's a big *nudge nudge, wink wink* to lawmakers.)
Photos: Down2Earth.eu/LCOGT.net/Ed Gomez
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