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Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
- jlarocco 4y agoAs cool as that is, I'm more interested in seeing how far inland the waves would go.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoSame. Shocking to see how the waves wrapped around the peninsula though. But also, was the impact site actually ocean when it was hit, or was it flooded after impact?
- herewulf 4y agoIt was ocean but it was sort of like hitting a shallow puddle for a 10 km diameter rock. The article didn't say but I was also curious and looked it up on Wikipedia: > The water depth at the impact site varied from 100 meters (330 ft) on the western edge of the crater to over 1,200 meters (3,900 ft) on the northeastern edge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Impact_specifics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Impact_specif...
- mc32 4y agoTrue, but it would depend on local topography/geography. I'd guess from a couple of miles up to a hundred miles inland in some places.
- maxerickson 4y agoThe press release says that there are plans to look at inundation. https://news.umich.edu/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-triggered-global-tsunami-that-scoured-seafloor-thousands-of-miles-from-impact-site/ https://news.umich.edu/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-triggered-g... They do say that airborne water and sediment traveled several hundred kilometers.
- kentlyons 4y agoIt also has some more details about wave height: "their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America’s Pacific coast."
- jmyeet 4y agoThere are a large number of events taht have happened many times in Earth's history and, given the cosmic timelines, will happen again, repeatedly. Some may be preventable with technology (eg asteroid impacts), others less so. A partial list is: tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, supervolcanoes, flood basalts, asteroid impacts, magnetic field reversals, climate change (eg ice once covered the equator, North America used to be covered in an ice sheet a mile thick not that long ago), particles in the atmosphere blocking the Sun, supernovas, gamma ray bursts, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It's kind of amazing we're here at all.
- auctoritas 4y agoMore amazing to realize without any of those things we wouldn't be here!
- indigodaddy 4y agoWow thinking about it from that perspective is also kind mind-blowing. Interesting point!
- jvm___ 4y agoThe Carrington event where a solar flare turned telegraph wires into those electromagnetd you build in elementary school. The current from the storm electrified all the telegraph cables. This would be bad for anything we've built that has a long cable run... https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vQURWMzE2MjgwNzI4MA/episode/NzdlMzg0ODAtOGE5OS0xMWVkLWI1NmMtOTc2YWM0ZDUyOGEz?ep=14 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh... Or how 536 was the worst year on record (and no one really knows why) https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vQURWMzE2MjgwNzI4MA/episode/NTNiMjhhMzQtYTA5Yy0xMWVkLTk4YTctODc0MTBhMjVlNDRk?ep=14 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...
- alister 4y ago> Or how 536 was the worst year on record Although I didn't listen to the 11 minute podcast, I was curious to know basically what it was about. This is what Wikipedia says about year 536: "In 2018, medieval scholar Michael McCormick nominated 536 as 'the worst year to be alive' because of the extreme weather events probably caused by a volcanic eruption early in the year, causing average temperatures in Europe and China to decline and resulting in crop failures and famine for well over a year. Other researchers have noted additional adverse events during the year, including a mysterious fog, possibly due to the volcanic eruption."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/536
- duxup 4y agoI struggle to imagine the impact of 2+ mile high waves. I’m imagining that much water would scour the land clear pretty severely.
- jacquesm 4y agoThere are a bunch of Coulees in North America, the effect of the water released in a very short time (48 hours) is still visible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee 18,000 years later. It is one of the most impressive landscapes that I've seen in person (that one, the Grand Canyon and a very large glacier in the North of Canada).
- onion2k 4y agoIt'd make everything wet, and do some other stuff.
- executive 4y agoMuseum just opened last year in the beach town/cruise port nearby. https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2022/10/dinosaurs-take-over-progreso/ https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2022/10/dinosaurs-take-over-...
- brink 4y agoI remember those waves on interstellar being a scarier adversary than Pennywise from IT. It must have been quite a sight. I wonder if any of the creatures from the event felt fear before the water washed over them.
- GalenErso 4y agoI have long said that if I was given the chance to go back in time just once, and come back, I would return 66 million years ago to witness the meteor impact from the safety of a space shuttle. And now I have an idea for Elon Musk: interplanetary disaster tourism. Purposefully crash asteroids on remote areas of Mars and charge for front row seats. This would have the added benefit of bringing valuable metal ores to be harvested close to the demand source.
- g0ran 4y ago> I would return 66 million years ago to witness the meteor impact from the safety of a space shuttle. Don't know how safe you would be. If I remember correctly, there's a theory saying that impact ejecta even shot out into space. Crazy.
- pr337h4m 4y agoThese would make amazing VR experiences
- raverbashing 4y agoHummmm VR tourism on Mars, that reminds me of something... But it might not be a great idea if the VR is too realistic /s
- fishtacos 4y agoMy most memorable VR experiences were a jellyfish/turtle scene and a closeup of a whale, among several games and apps I tried with my headset some years ago. Games were fun enough, some good, some not. The visual, non-interactive experience gave me a true sense of awe, as if I were transposed into another reality briefly. Not a big fan of the whole "meta" idea, but executed and refined properly, we'll be in the matrix soon enough. Glad I won't be participating :)
- geuis 4y agoJust to put the numbers in slightly easier to imagine numbers: imagine ocean waves about 13000 feet or 4 kilometers high. No, I can't really imagine it either. In San Francisco, the tallest building is the Salesforce Tower at 1070ft. The biggest wave would be about 13 times taller than that. I totally have trouble visualizing it, other than just looking up and up and up.
- merek 4y agoMt. Fuji stands at 3.8km (12,467ft). They say the wave reached 4.5km, so maybe Mt. Fuji with the Burj Khalifa (~800m) on top? Still very difficult to picture as a wall of water.
- tstrimple 4y agoThose aren’t mountains.
- downrightmike 4y agoThe best hope would be that the mountains and ground whittle it down and that it drains quickly. May explain why rodents survived, in that dry to moderately dry ground doesn't soak up water quickly, so if it drained away before the burrows were soaked/drowned, there is a chance at survival.
- jacquesm 4y agoLikely such a wave would scour the coastline many, many miles inland and the land would essentially have to be re-settled all over again by all of the life forms that thrived there before. There is very little chance that a burrow would not be flooded, but many rodents are good swimmers and there will be lots of stuff floating about.
- codeulike 4y agoThere was a lot more to worry about than the wave. Anything within about 1500 km of the impact site was instantly vaporised. Then afterwards the whole atmosphere was oven-hot for several minutes. Then there was very little sunlight for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA
- 7speter 4y agoWho needs this when theres the last two seasons of The Expanse?
- goatlover 4y agoI found the last two seasons somewhat disappointing. Still a good show, but the first four were a lot stronger. I did go read the books, so I know what happens over the last three books. It's a real shame they didn't have more seasons to cover the Laconia plot, other than to tease it in the last season with the Strange Dogs novella material. The problem with the last two seasons is the heavy focus on Sol politics a full season after the gates were opened and the big alien mystery is left hanging.
- test7899 4y agoAre we sure an asteroid killed the dinosaurs? Vulcano erruption leaving the earth in darkness for a prolonged time is another theory.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoWe are reasonably sure, yes. Significantly more sure since January 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_extinctio... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/science/dinosaurs-extinction-meteorite-volcano.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/science/dinosaurs-extinct... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay5055 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay5055 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382232/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382232/
- xbmcuser 4y agoWhy can't it be both such big impact could have resulted in a volcanic eruptions.
- goatlover 4y agoOr volcanic eruptions were going on prior to the impact. They are implicated in most of the other global extinction events.
- midoridensha 4y agoWhat ultimately killed the dinosaurs was their own stupidity, greed, and short-sightedness. If they were smart, they would have developed a good space exploration program and technologies to track potentially dangerous asteroids and adjust their orbits before they collide with Earth. They didn't bother to work to protect their only habitat, so it was rendered uninhabitable, killing almost all of them off. Hopefully, future inhabitants of Earth will learn this lesson in time, but I doubt it.
- jvm___ 4y agoI mean, we have all those fossil fuels. They must have had them, their names right on them; why didn't they use those?
- ck2 4y agoSome game engine could do a 3D simulation over real google earth view with current cities?
- hattmall 4y agoSo like how much would the sea have retreated? Or would the impact not result in that like a regular tsunami?
- bash-j 4y agoI wonder how they simulate the displacement of water since it's not from how tsunamis usually occur. A lot of water you think would be vaporised into the air and moved with the shockwaves. Plus there is only so much water at the impact site, not an unlimited amount. Given the speed of the impact, would it move as much water? They say when you jump off a bridge, the impact is like hitting cement.
- las_balas_tres 4y agoAs far as i know, the earth's crust below and around the impact gets displaced by a fair amount. I think the crust acts like a rubber sheet bouncing backwards and forwards. This most likely contributes toward the displacement of water above.
- Gibbon1 4y agoThat reminds me, I remember reading some NASA stuff my dad would bring home talking about simulations of impacts. While there are very few on earth there are vast numbers on the moon and other planets. I think the forces and energies are so large that the fluid dynamics dominate.
- fritzo 4y ago> 30,000 times more initial energy than any recorded events As a statistician: this is why heavy-tailed modeling matters. Schools teach the finite-variance version of the Central Limit Theorem and students believe they live in a normal world. The real Central Limit Theorem [1] predicts large rare events following Lévy α-stable distributions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution#A_generalized_central_limit_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution#A_generali...
- oneoff786 4y agoThe central limit theorem applies to sample means, not individual events. I’m not sure it has any relevance to predicting the probability of a single large outlier tsunami
- nextos 4y agoThis is so true. Heavy-tailed distributions and extreme value theory [1,2] should be taught more widely. The normal distribution is just a very particular case of the generalized CLT. For example, some drug effects are heavy-tailed, but safety trials are often ignoring this. [1] https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2013-SIGMETRICS-heavytails.pdf https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2013-SIGM... [2] https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/book-05-11.pdf https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/book-05-1...
- buryat 4y ago> some drug effects are heavy-tailed where can i read about this? curious
- cosmojg 4y agoGot any sources which discuss the heavy-tailed effects of drugs and how they're ignored by safety trials? I'd love to read more!
- nextos 4y agoI don't have references with me right now, but there are quite a few reputable studies that have found effects to be log-normal. Log-normal is a quite nasty heavy-tailed distribution as it's easy to take it for normal if you have small sample sizes. This has tricked the safety calculations of a few trials. I don't think it's too worrying or generalized, just some area to improve.
- vjtvalero 4y agoI wish someone make a 3d simulation of the tsunamis and put them in VR. Or even make a survival game out of it. Like a stage in fortnite.
- 12907835202 4y agoIf this were to happen today now much evidence would be find of our current civilisations? Would archeologists be able to figure out our cities?
- nerdponx 4y agoI get the impression that there might not be any archaeologists left after such an event.
- tempestn 4y agoA few humans might survive. If not, there might be other archaeologists, eventually...
- outworlder 4y agoNot likely, if we are talking about millions of years. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/june-30-2018-a-comet-from-the-stars-microbiome-and-arthritis-polar-bear-treadmill-and-more-1.4724524/fossils-of-our-civilization-what-humans-will-leave-behind-1.4724531 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/june-30-2018-a-comet-from-th...
- yodon 4y agoAsking how you could tell if Dinosaurs had a civilization like ours used to be a standard Geology Dept. PhD orals question. Their cities would of course be long long, so that's not a productive search area. The answer is you'd look at the distribution of minerals. If they built cities with skyscrapers they would have had to mine the materials required to make them. There is no evidence the Dinosaurs exploited their available mineral sources but millions of years from now there will still be ample evidence that we did.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoOf course this also means that pre-industrial civilizations are completely undetectable after several million years.
- Tokkemon 4y agoWasn't this the end of Deep Impact?
- mkl 4y agoNo, that was much smaller in comparison. In the movie they managed to break it up so only smaller pieces hit.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThe tsunami after the #1 earthquake ever recorded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeKewmAoBEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeKewmAoBEM
- bytesandbots 4y agoThere needs to be another video from opposite side of the world. And data on how much difference is there in the severity on both sides. The 2020 paper establishing Chicxulub event as the driving factor of extinction also said that "prolonged eruption of the Deccan traps might have acted as an ameliorating agent" i.e. cancelling the negative effects of asteroid impact. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382232/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382232/
- deniscepko2 4y agoCan anyone explain how can it be 20 kilometers in depth and yet Mariana trench is the deepest place on earth 11km ?
- seanhunter 4y agoThe article says: > The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. So I guess plate techtonics have caused things to shift around such that the crater isn't a hole in the surface now, but is underneath other rock?
- ppsreejith 4y agoFun fact: If you google "Chicxulub crater" you see an animation of an asteroid crashing.
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoIt was an impact crater. Over millions of years it was filled with sediment, so it's not that deep anymore.
- unwind 4y agoWow, very impressive visualization. Minor editing needed in the bullet point factoids: The amplitude of the wave animated here reached 1.5 km miles high (0.93 miles) but the initial wave might have reached 4.5 kilometers high (2.8 miles). Also, I think they could have gone with "1.6 km (1 mile)" or maybe "1.5 km (about 1 mile)" perhaps. Oh well.
- brailsafe 4y agoRIP Louisiana goddamn
- benknight87 4y agoKurzgesagt did a pretty good job of this https://youtu.be/dFCbJmgeHmA https://youtu.be/dFCbJmgeHmA
- pcblues 4y agoWe sometimes mistakenly think history started with the written words we find. But a story travels much further from the past however it is told. And this would be a hell of a flood story.
- frankfrankfrank 4y agoThat seems like a bad model if it does not include the effects of the waves penetrating inland and instead acts as if the coasts are inviolable.
- nixass 4y agoThis particular event happened 66M years ago, it would be wild guess to include effects on land that may have or haven't existed then.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoI don't see why it would be any more of a wild guess than the guess at what rock layers were hit by the asteroid and what effect they had at displacing water.
- Xophmeister 4y agoI also wonder if the model also accounts for vapourisation. Over the entire ocean, the effect may be negligible, but local to the impact may have made a non-trivial difference.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoMost of these asteroid impact models are also missing the secondary impact events from ejecta. For very small asteroids it's not much of a concern but anything large enough to be dangerous would kick out enough material to create a storm of falling superheated boulders. Big enough asteroids can blast stuff into orbit which then falls all over the Earth.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoSuperheated as opposed to plainly-heated?
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y agoThe tsunami was a minor effect from that asteroid - setting the whole planet on fire and releasing a ton of toxic gases in the athmosphere is what did the real damage.
- afrcnc 4y agotwo words here: laser printers!
- smusamashah 4y agoHumans didn't exist back then. But taking into account how much destruction and change it did to all life on earth, if this event never happened, would we have still evolved into current humans?
- buryat 4y agomammals existed since 200 million years ago but didn't get a chance to dominate until dinosaurs freed up ecological niches and removed competition
- olzhas 4y ago4 meters*
- pmoriarty 4y agoHere[1] is one of the most impressive asteroid impact simulations I have seen, from the Discover Channel's Miracle Planet. [1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PENT_hnyO-o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PENT_hnyO-o
- senttoschool 4y agoIn the video, they said an impact like that happened an estimated 6 times and each time, life sprung back. The whole surface was sterilized. This makes me think that if life comes back after that 6 times, then it must be pretty easy for life to start.
- phailhaus 4y agoStarting life is very different from recovering it. Luckily none of those asteroids killed all life.
- senttoschool 4y agoIn this particular Youtube video, they mentioned that the object that hit Earth was 500km or roughly 38 times larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I could believe that the Earth was sterilized from an impact that large.
- phailhaus 4y agoWhen did it hit though, do we even know if life had started yet?
- krisoft 4y ago> This makes me think that if life comes back after that 6 times, then it must be pretty easy for life to start. Or that they are wrong and the whole surface was not in fact sterilised. Or life survived somewhere other than on the surface (deep underground, underwater, or high in the sky).
- dasil003 4y ago