Seventy percent of Earth ’s surface is covered by water , think if we were unfortunate enough to be strike by an enormous asteroid , it ’d believably make a big splash . A team of data scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratoryrecently decided to modelwhat would happen if an asteroid take the ocean . Despite the apocalyptic subject issue , the results are quite beautiful .
Galen Gisler and his colleagues at LANL are using supercomputer to visualize how the kinetic energy of a tight - moving quad rock would be transferred to the ocean on impact . The results , which Gisler salute at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week , may amount as a surprisal to those who rise up on catastrophe movies like Deep Impact . Asteroids are point source , and it turn out waves sire by point sources diminish rapidly , rather than grow more savage as they cover hundreds of miles to swallow New York .
The bad concern , in most asteroid - on - ocean state of affairs , is water vapor .
“ The most significant consequence of an impact into the ocean is the injection of weewee vaporization into the stratosphere , with possible climate effect ” Gisler said . Indeed , Gisler ’s simulations show that large ( 250 meter - across ) rock coming in very hot could vaporize up to 250 metric megatons of water . Lofted into the troposphere , that water vapor would rain down out fairly cursorily . But water vapor that give it all the way up to the stratosphere can stay there for a while . And because it ’s a potent greenhouse gas , this could have a major gist on our climate .
Of naturally , not all asteroids make it to the control surface at all . Smaller sized unity , which are much more common in our solar locality , tend to explode while they ’re still in the sky , creating a pressure wave that propagates outwards in all directions . Gisler ’s role model show that when these “ airburst ” asteroids strike over the ocean , they bring forth less stratospheric water vapor , and smaller waves . “ The airburst considerably mitigate the effect on the water , ” he say .
Overall , Gisler says , asteroid over the ocean pose less of a peril to humans than asteroids over the land . There ’s one bighearted exclusion , however , and that ’s asteroids that strike near a coastline .
“ An shock or an airburst [ near ] a populated shore will be very unsafe , ” Gisler say . In that instance , the mammoth , city - devouring tsunami every B - list disaster movie has primed you for might actually come .
Correction : An earliest rendering of this stake misspell Dr. Gisler ’s last name . The text has been updated .
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