Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Choose your own disaster
Space.com ran a story about a new Impact Effects Generator that the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona-Tucson has posted on their website. The site is supposed to be an aid to scientists who wish to throw some thought at what might happen if such-and-such an asteroid hit the earth.
It's just one of those scholarly endeavors that is both serious and entertaining. Serious: because you're staring directly at the very real effects of a Hollywood-style natural disaster, the kind that has happened (and likely will again). Entertaining: because you made that disaster yourself.
So I wondered, personally, what would happen if a...rather large asteroid (one about 4.35 miles in diameter, which is actually only about half the size of the bugger they theorize killed off those dinosaurs) smacked into lovely little Sioux City, IA, about 100 miles north of here. I picked Sioux City, really, because I wanted to be far enough away not to at least see what happened. The calculator churned out very detailed information about my tailor-made cataclysm.
Turns out I wasn't far enough away.
In Omaha we'd see a fireball with a 57.8 mile radius. 4.76 seconds after impact, we'd be hit with a blast of air that would last over two minutes and would give us third degree burns--not to mention set our clothes on fire. As well as newspaper. And the grass. And the trees.
Next we'd feel the earthquake. The earthquake would rank 9.6 on the Richter scale, so my house would fall in on itself, and then fall in the huge gaping rend in the earth.
After a couple more minutes, all the dirt that had been in Sioux City would fall on us. We'd be covered in about 76 feet of it, which is good, because being buried by all that dirt would save me the extra step of having to stop, drop, and roll since I and all my clothes would be on fire. Finally, just when I'm starting to catch my breath, the air blast would hit, loud as heavy traffic and fast as a stock car. It would, naturally, mow down a third of my neighborhood's trees, and probably snuff out the rest, the tops of which would be peeking above the 76 feet of dirt and still burning like matchsticks.
Man, you put it like that, and it's pretty darned serious.
Come on, make your own natural disaster. You know you wanna. It's fun.
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