"Robert A. Howard" wrote:
>
> I was watching that joke of a movie, Armageddon (nice premise, but they
> ignored physics quite a bit - they should not have been able to achieve that
> level of gravity on Mir, the Cosmnonaut should have been on his back when
> returning to Earth after so long on a 0-G space station, I doubt the
> explosion would have looked like the Death Star blowing up (the redigitized
> version), and etc.) and was thinking of a game setting where an asteroid hit
> but life survived.
Probably not, unless they put that nuke *exactly* on the fault line. Of
course, there wouldn't have been that perfectly circular ring then.
Nuclear explosions in space, and there've only been a couple of tests,
are very bizarre looking things. Oh, and forget lying on his back on
Earth, the 11 G transit of the moon would have killed him...
> Then I was thinking... the problem with an asteroid hitting is the high
> percentage chance of it hitting water... and all the dust thrown into the
> atmosphere by it.
A good sized asteroid still hits land when it hits water, it just takes
an extra second to punch through a mile and a half of liquid. At least
if it's big enough. Otherwise you just get tidal waves and a massive
amount of water vapor (and fish guts) added suddenly to the atmosphere.
> But what if the asteroid hit a small (in the total scheme of things) but
> high target... the Himilaya Mountains (more specifically, around Mt.
> Everest). The top of those mountains are in the upper atmosphere already.
> What would be the effects of the dust and the impact itself? Would the
> devestation be as bad? Worse? Or would most of the dust be tossed into outer
> space itself (possibly, in a couple million years, making a ring around
> Earth)? Any clues?
The local devastation would probably be far worse. Any good nuclear bomb
maker will tell you that the bomb is most effective when detonated at
high altitude (about a mile for a multi-megaton device). Because that
keeps half the force of the explosion from being wasted on moving earth.
However, the long-range effects would probably be less damaging. Instead
of a massive rolling shock-wave liquefying the ground, the meteorite
would probably just vaporize most of Everest, and the shockwave would be
95% airborne. Say a few dozen atmospheres of overpressure, that would
indicate about a 200 mile radius kill zone, with about a 50% falloff/50
mile fatality zone around that. The airborne dust particles would
probably be much less, and the overall effect on the weather would be
less.
That said, even the top of Everest still lies well within the
Troposphere (the active, weather producing part of the atmosphere.) Most
clouds top out at over 50,000 feet, twice as tall as Everest.
As for dust hitting outer space, I recall reading something in a
magazine about how some guy had tried to simulate the Dinosaur ending
impact on a computer, and had discovered that Earth would have had a
somewhat faint ring for up to 1000 years after the impact. The reason
the ring was so short lived was the tidal force of the moon breaking it
up.
Hope that helps.
I personally like the idea at the start of the movie of the possibility
of lots of small debris hitting at random. Far more dangerous without
all the large-scale climatological effects to worry about.
Jeff Naujok
The DragonSpawn RPG
Available FREE! at
http://www.dalhart.com/DragonSpawn
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