We 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.
Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
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Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#72That 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.
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#73> 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_generali...
It would save quite a few ocean going ships if this was more appreciated. Those once-in-a-thousand-year-rogue-waves are much more frequent than once in a thousand years. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jul/26/uknews But we're still designing ships as though they only happen once every thousand years because the cargo and the ship are insured and the crews are considered expendable.
Because a few ships a year are expendable for the global economy.
Not worth it to try to make every ship less sinkable - e.g. it may decrease the number of annual losses by 50% at the cost of making an average ship 10% more expensive - obviously a bad trade. Some ships will still sink, because of stuff like human errors.
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#74Wasn't this the end of Deep Impact?
No, that was much smaller in comparison. In the movie they managed to break it up so only smaller pieces hit.
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#75Just 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.
I can visualize: the highest peak around me is 3200 km
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#76> 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_generali...
Heavy-tailed modeling doesn't reallly matter. There are very few enterprices where preparing for extremely rare events is worth the effort - nuclear power plants, weapons of mass destruction, bio labs working with dangerous organisms, big chemical plants, maybe AI research and big particle accelerators.
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would save quite a few ocean going ships if this was more appreciated. Those once-in-a-thousand-year-rogue-waves are much more frequent than once in a thousand years. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jul/26/uknews But we're still designing ships as though they only happen once every thousand years because the cargo and the ship are insured and the crews are considered expendable.
> Research at Imperial College, London, shows that far from being rare events, rogue waves can emerge frequently, and may be responsible for some of the 200 supertankers and container ships longer than 200m that have sunk in poor weather conditions in the past two decades. The loss of ten ships a year seems incredible to me. Surely "weather", if it were to blame, could be avoided. This amount of loss is steep. Is it…
'Surely "weather", if it were to blame, could be avoided.'
AFAIK rogue waves are called 'rogue' due to their unpredictability.
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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 b…
LEO may not even be safe, would it? Afaik a large part of the damage was the heating of the atmosphere from enormous amounts of secondary impacts due to the debris - many of these small rocks probably flung up into LEO, though it would be interesting to know how risky a stay in LEO would be during such an impact. If you want a SciFi story touching many such topics I highly recommend "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson.
Parameters for 300 km range (200 km STS altitude + downrange)
https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?d...
Thermal Radiation:
Time for maximum radiation: 11.5 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius: 223 km ( = 138 miles )
The fireball appears 169 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 7.72 x 10^9 Joules/m^2
Duration of Irradiation: 49.7 minutes
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 2590
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#79The 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.
Re: Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves
#80Are we sure an asteroid killed the dinosaurs? Vulcano erruption leaving the earth in darkness for a prolonged time is another theory.
What 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,…
If only they had listened to Elonis muskasaurus !