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Posted on 04/28/2014 2:50:08 PM PDT by blam
Scientists Have Underestimated The Likelihood Of City-Killing Asteroids Hitting Earth
Reuters
Irene Klotz, Reuters
Apr. 28, 2014, 2:59 PM
The chance of a city-killing asteroid striking Earth is higher than scientists previously believed, a non-profit group building an asteroid-hunting telescope said on Tuesday.
A global network that listens for nuclear weapons detonations detected 26 asteroids that exploded in Earth's atmosphere from 2000 to 2013, data collected by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization shows.
The explosions include the Feb. 15, 2013, impact over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which left more than 1,000 people injured by flying glass and debris.
"There is a popular misconception that asteroid impacts are extraordinarily rare ... that's incorrect," said former astronaut Ed Lu, who now heads the California-based B612 Foundation.
The foundation on Tuesday released a video visualization of the asteroid strikes in an attempt to raise public awareness of the threat.
Asteroids as small as about 131 feet (40 meters) — less than half the size of an American football field — have the potential to level a city, Lu told reporters on a conference call
"Picture a large apartment building — moving at Mach 50," Lu said.
Mach 50 is 50 times the speed of sound, or roughly 38,000 mph (61,250 kph).
NASA already has a program in place that tracks asteroids larger than 0.65 mile (1 km). An object of this size, roughly equivalent to a small mountain, would have global consequences if it struck Earth.
An asteroid about 6 miles (10 km) in diameter hit Earth some 65 million years ago, triggering climate changes that are believed to have caused the dinosaurs — and most other life on Earth at the time — to die off.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Before a city killing asteroid can kill a city, it has to hit it. In all of written history there have been a couple such asteroids, and they missed the cities.
Yawn.
I’m waiting for the planet killer.
“.any chance of steering it to DC?“
I vote for that....
Women and Minority Groups to suffer most.
RUN for your LIVES!!!!
Catch Detroit on the ricochet? LA on the bounce? NYC on the skip? Chicago on the hop?
It’s one reason I always have an umbrella in the car trunk. You never know.
Only 10% of the world population lives in the Southern Hemisphere. Make everybody move South of the equator and we’d have no more worries.
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A global network that listens for nuclear weapons detonations detected 26 asteroids that exploded in Earth's atmosphere from 2000 to 2013, data collected by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization shows.
No kidding. Shear scare mongering.
You’d think that at any time one of those killer asteroids could come screaming out of the sky without warning and annihilate where I’m
Why worry about an asteroid when I got F-3/5 tornadoes landing nearby on a yearly basis?
Stars Fell On Alabama?
Yep...that’s what it says on our car tags (if you choose) and what the song says...and now what the scientists say...lol
Tonight it looks like tornadoes are a bigger concern. They should be in my area soon...thankfully I have a basement to go to which is fairly rare in this area.
I'm on the coast and can't have a basement.
Batten the hatches!
The Very Real Threat of
Comet and Asteroid Bombardment
by John S. Lewis
view and download the video here:
B612 Foundation:
Oooh, nice! In Texas there’s an amphitheater built into a crater, great, now this will bug me until I look it up...
Most of the land area is in the northern hemisphere, and one entire s-hemisphere continent is basically uninhabitable (although I’ve seen some sentiment for making all the muzzies move there).
http://www.barringercrater.com/education/craterfacts.php
The crater is about 1 mile wide and 570 ft deep... About 50,000 years ago, a meteorite traveling about 20 km/s smashed into the Arizona desert. The explosion was equal to 2.5 megatons of TNT... The meteorite was made of nickel-iron and is estimated to have been about 45 meters (150 ft) across, weighing about 270,000 metric tons (300,000 tons).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071107-russia-crater.html
On June 30, 1908, a ball of fire exploded about 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the ground in the sparsely populated region, scientists say. The blast released 15 megatons of energy—about a thousand times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—and flattened 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest.
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