In this event there were over a dozen massive impacts in just a few days... Just one of those impacts were believed to be equivalent to hundreds of times greater than the earth's *entire* nuclear arsenal.
Posted on 04/20/2014 7:56:31 AM PDT by upchuck
The problem with that thought is small bodies impacting larger ones can and does change the orbit of the larger body ... many such collisions would and do send those larger bodies into the inner Solar System.
Then there are long period comets which come into the inner System once in thousands or millions of years. No one knows how many there are, just that they exist and do come into the System - one impacted Jupiter quite spectacularly some decades ago.
So discounting the mean size of a potential asteroid making it to Earth is an error. The Earth’s Solar System is by no means cleaned up and remains a very messy place.
In this event there were over a dozen massive impacts in just a few days... Just one of those impacts were believed to be equivalent to hundreds of times greater than the earth's *entire* nuclear arsenal.
A different verse from Revelation has always made me think of an asteroid strike: Rev 8:8 “...and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.”
if anything seriously huge hits ocean there will be tsunamis.
The Tunguska event in 1908 was the last really good one. It hit out in the middle of nowhere, so there were few witnesses and no documented fatalities. But the eyewitness accounts resemble a decent-sized thermonuclear bomb. It flattened 770 square miles of Siberian forest. So, it would have been really interesting if it come down on a large city.
Last year's Chelyabinsk event was estimated to have released about 500kt in energy. But it came in at very shallow angle and exploded at a very high altitude. It could easily have come in at a higher angle and exploded much lower, destroying the city. Just blind luck, as the man said.
If Chelyabinsk or Tunguska had happened over the South Indian Ocean, I wonder what the news impact would have been.
If anything huge hits, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference what it hits. Bad things result.
That's of the Earth's land mass. However, 71% of the Earth's surface is water, and asteroids don't care, so the actual percentage is more like 0.87%.
Thanks, I hadn’t made that connection. I’m sure you’re right. So any asteroid impact has perhaps a 1% chance of hitting a city.
Might be accurate, however a large asteroid could impact hundreds of miles away from a big city and literally devastate the city and the entire region...Or much worse.
Ahhh. . .it could be I’m not good at picking up satire. . .so, no worries.
Cheers.
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