Quote:
Originally Posted by Spunky
What are we going to do when one actually hits us
|
Because the earth is 2/3rds ocean, odds are it will hit water. Since the deepest part of the ocean is only 7 miles, if we ever get a big one it would displace the ocean water to its bottom point basically and create tsunami's that would make that big one in Indonesia look like a little ripple. There'd me massive earthquakes worldwide, and a pressure and heat wave that would ignite fires and instantly obliterate anything for hundreds and possibly thousands of miles it it hits land.
Even a small one strike a big city like New York could wipe it completely out in a second.
And its going to happen, just a matter of when.
These are all the previous large meteors that NASA has determined have actually hit the US over the past couple hundred million years.
http://www.gearthblog.com/images/impacts.jpg
And the world's major impacts:
http://spaceinfo.jaxa.jp/note/taiyo/...crater_01e.jpg
Our best shot is to develop a nuke baked defense system that will not take out the incoming meteor, but explode close enough to alter its course a tad which is all it takes.
Another theory is to land small ion generating thruster rockets on the surface
to shift its course.
And lastly to use the US's advanced laser system to zap a warm spot on it using laser beams, which would also alter its course.
http://seti.dyndns.org/images/Meteor%20Strike.jpg
A celestial body some 100 meters in diameter, which was supposed to be a meteorite, impacted at Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908. Friction heat generated by contact with the Earth's atmosphere caused this celestial body to break up and explode at an altitude some 6 kilometers above ground surface. This explosion created intense heat which burned an area extending for a 20 kilometer radius from the blast epicenter. Conifer forest covering roughly a 2,000 square kilometers area (equivalent to the size of Tokyo) was completely mowed down by the force of this event (with trees being knocked over in a radial pattern extending from the epicenter).
On average, a Tunguska class meteor impacts with the Earth once every several centuries. Although the odds of such an impact directly on a heavily populated area are estimated to be once in every 100,000 years, if such an event happens, the impact would pose the threat of major disaster.
The giant Chicxulub crater was identified at the north of the Yucatan on the basis of gravity distribution measurements taken from the air (this type of geological survey is used in prospecting for oil). It is believed that this crater was created 65 million years ago by the impact of an asteroid 10 km in diameter. The crater itself is 180 km across, and is believed to be the largest terrestrial impact event occurring since the emergence of life on Earth some 570 million years ago.
According to a subsequent study, the theory suggesting that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by this meteorite's impact has become the most likely.
