Sooner or later, the Earth will again collide with a fairly large asteroid. This can cause a powerful shock or heat wave, earthquakes, fires and tsunamis … Scientists have estimated which of the consequences of the impact of a celestial body is more dangerous than others.
Scientists from the team of Professor Clemens Rumpf at the University of Southampton (Clemens Rumpf) have identified seven key threats associated with the fall of a moderate to large asteroid to Earth: earthquakes, shock and heat waves, airborne fragments, hurricane winds, tsunamis and crater formation. In an article published in Geophysical Research Letters, they assessed the potential lethality of each of these factors.
With the help of computer simulations, they examined the results of the fall of 50 thousand "virtual" asteroids to the Earth with a diameter of 15 to 400 m, having obtained the figures of possible mortality from the influence of seven factors of such an impact. The most dangerous were two - the hurricane and the shock wave raised by the explosion: they were responsible for an average of 60 percent of the deaths.
As a rule, land strikes were an order of magnitude heavier in terms of the number of deaths. Of course, the hit of a celestial body in the ocean caused a tsunami, but the wave's energy was dissipated quite efficiently, and could only reach coastal settlements. The authors concluded that tsunamis are, on average, responsible for 20 percent of the lives lost. Heat wave accounts for another 30 percent, seismic activity - only 0.17 percent, death from raised "fragments" - about a percent.
The authors note that asteroids with a diameter of about 60 m collide with the planet on average every 1500 years, and 400 m - every 100 thousand "The probability of such an impact is very small," says Clemens Rumpf, "but the consequences may not be imaginable." Scientists hope that the data they obtained will help draw global attention to the asteroid threat, which equally affects all inhabitants of the planet, and begin joint defense planning.
It should be added that Professor Rumpf and his colleagues did not consider all the dangers that the fall of a large asteroid brings. It is not for nothing that some of these catastrophes are associated with global climate change, extinctions and abrupt changes in the entire biosphere of the planet. The study considered only “primary” hazards for people.
Sergey Vasiliev