Feb 08 2010
The Impact of an Impact
This video shows the potential impact of a 500km asteroid. As you can see, it would kill of all life and drastically alter the topography of the Earth. At the end of the video, it states that evidence shows that this has happened at least 6 times in Earth’s history.
Gravitational influence from planets and the sun is what pulls asteroids out of orbit from between Jupiter and Mars which can lead to the potential devastating impact of Earth (Hyndman and Hyndman pg 473). Most asteroids do not make it past Earth’s atomosphere, instead, they disintegrate.
On June 30th, 1908, an asteroid that was 150-300 ft in diameter penetrated Earth’s atomosphere. It created an “enormous aerial explosion” that flattened about 500,000 acres of forest near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia. Because it disintegrated above Earth’s surface, it created a huge fireball, but no crater; the energy created was about equal to 15 megatons of TNT. This was strong enough to shake buildings and knock people down. It also resulted in several bright nights throughout Russia and Europe. This was the most destructive event of an impact in recent history. See the below link for more information
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Tunguska+event
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WOW!! That video was really cool and pretty helpful, along with your post, in understanding the potential destruction from a significantly large impact. Like you bring up, it is very odd to think about that having happened something like 6 times in earth’s history. We talked about in class how compared to the whole earth’s history, the time human-like life has existed is almost unimaginably short. It is easier to imagine an impact happening before human-like life existed, but it is very hard for me to imagine it happening now, with all the people who are aware of what is going on around them and who have built so much. How just one, unknowing impact from space could eliminate what we see as having taken a very long time to build.
One question I had, and I am not sure if your group is just focusing on asteroids and thus would not necessarily know this, but do only asteroids cause impacts? I guess I am not sure on the difference between asteroids, comets, meteors and meteorites; I tend to group all those together in some ways. I found this website that seemed to explain them individually, but did not relate them to impacts.
http://www.kidscosmos.org/kid-stuff/asteroid-facts.html
And this link was helpful too.
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/meteor_worldbook.html
This is a great post to get us started and intrigued about impacts. Your post has really got be thinking and I have a lot of questions for your group. First of all, I was wondering if the asteroid shown in the video (with a diameter of 500km) is the same size as the asteroid that is believed to have brought upon the extinction of the dinosaurs? If not, is the dinosaur asteroid larger or smaller and what different impacts would its size have? My next questions have to do with sizes of asteroids. I feel like we only ever talk about the very large and destructive asteroids that bring upon mass destruction, but how common are the smaller ones. I appreciate the smaller asteroid example in the post, but I mean even smaller than that. I realize the asteroid in the post did not survive to hit earth’s surface, and I am wondering is that an issue of size or speed or something else? Is that the reason why we do not hear about small sized asteroids or debris impacting earth, because they disintegrate before they reach earth’s surface? If this is all true, then how big do asteroids need to be to still make some sort of impact on earth’s surface (like your example of Stony Tunguska River in Siberia)?