[meteorite-list] LANL: Meteor Could Cause Big Tsunami

From: Chris Peterson <clp_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jan 11 22:12:46 2005
Message-ID: <07e501c4f854$10b7d180$f551040a_at_bellatrix>

>From 1994? And Russian, too? Might as well be the middle ages! <g> Like I
said, I think I'll wait for the simulations to improve. Personally, I would
be no more surprised by 1000m waves than by 10m waves. And I wouldn't make
fun of the work at Los Alamos that led to the smaller value (some of the
best work in modeling impacts is coming out of Los Alamos) or of the
newspapers reporting on the research.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly_at_bhil.com>
To: "Meteorite-List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Cc: "Chris Peterson" <clp_at_alumni.caltech.edu>; "Ron Baalke"
<baalke_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>; "edward moore" <edward_f_moore@yahoo.com>;
"Darren Garrison" <cynapse_at_charter.net>; "harlan trammell"
<skyrox_at_hotmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 6:36 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] LANL: Meteor Could Cause Big Tsunami


> Hi, Chris, List,
>
> The graphs in "Tsunami Generated by Small Asteroid Impacts" by Hills,
> Nemchinov, Popov, and Teterev in the UofA Press collection "Hazards Due To
> Comets and Asteroids" (1994) show that for a 800 meter soft stone object
> impacting in Atlantic deep water at 20 km/sec (average velocity for an
> impactor), the height of the ocean wave 1000 kilometers away from the
> point of
> impact would be 100 meters. Upon reaching the shallows which surround
> Florida,
> the run-up height would increase to approximately 1000 meters (one full
> order of
> magnitude).
> Yes, friends, that's one full kilometer of water. I think that would
> make it
> all the way cross the peninsula, don't you? I believe that hill near
> Micanopy is
> about 95 meters high, which leaves lots of room (905 meters) for water
> overhead!
>
> An 800 meter iron meteorite in the same place, same velocity, would
> produce
> a water wave of 340 meters, ramping up to a 3400 meter wave on shore.
> That's a
> wave over two miles high! Hello, Atlanta! Hello, Memphis! Hello, Houston!
> Heck,
> I'm only 447 feet above sea level here in Illinois! How high did you say
> Denver
> was?
> Let's say the models are off by a factor of two, or four or even ten;
> it's
> still Goodbye, Florida!
> Actually, Chris is right; there is on-going dispute about impact
> tsunami
> models. The dispute originates in the fact that it is difficult to find
> geological evidence for the very large scale tsunamis predicted for
> impacts that
> must have geologically frequent, hence suspicions have arisen that the
> models
> are exaggerated. On the other hand, what are the geological evidences of
> really
> ancient tsunamis and how easy to find would they be?
> I recall reading many years ago an account of using steam hoses to
> excavate
> a layer at a site in Alaska in which flora and fauna were churned up
> together,
> mammoths and tree trunks, all jumbled and squashed in a tangled mass, and
> the
> author wondering what could have caused it, earthquake, landslide? All of
> a
> sudden it sounds a lot like a tsunami to me. In fact, I recall a number of
> fossil sites where remains are jumbled and compressed and the
> investigators
> always attribute it to "flash floods" or "landslides." Hmmm.
> Would a Florida tsunami only 330 feet high feel much better to a person
> than
> a Florida tsunami 3300 feet high, if it was just you standing on the beach
> at
> Jupiter, waiting for it to hit you? In practical terms, I think the
> results
> would be pretty much identical...
>
> Sterling K. Webb
Received on Tue 11 Jan 2005 10:09:01 PM PST