• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

That was too close... Five asteroid impacts that never were

Regarding the 17th September 1918 event - a nice real live example about an impact this size is the Ries crater in southern Germany (always worth a trip). 15 my ago, but you still have a circular >20 km structure stamped into the swabian alb, with tens of meters of ejecta still covering the landscape for 40 km even after glaciation.
So enough to take out one side in the war entirely (but also would make the war effort for everybody else a bit difficult).
 
I may be wrong, but I think I've heard on a conference some time ago that the early warning community was well aware of potential meteorite related events (not necessarily the very big ones, but at least smaller stuff). Actually, there had a decent overview of near Earth debris before the planetary science community (and still have, regarding quasi-moons).
 
I may be wrong, but I think I've heard on a conference some time ago that the early warning community was well aware of potential meteorite related events (not necessarily the very big ones, but at least smaller stuff). Actually, there had a decent overview of near Earth debris before the planetary science community (and still have, regarding quasi-moons).
There's visibility of most potential events these days - but definitely not 100%.
It would be marvellous irony if the claim you heard was just before the mid-2017 near-miss.
 
Fantastic - Andy actually found who to attribute that image of the Hadean Era to! I've been using that in my day-job lecture slides for five years with 'image credit unknown'!

I also appreciate the Twilight's Last Gleaming shoutout. I hadn't heard of a number of these near misses so, as David notes above, lots of fuel for potential stories.
 
And here's a fun animation, from the B612 Foundation.
Lots of kilotonne+ impacts from 2000-2014


 
Back
Top