Re: Comet impact in the Eastern United States - Feasibility of Evacuation

In article <fr2a0b$bhu$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 jdnicoll@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (James Nicoll) wrote:

> In article
<606fddac-d790-45bb-aed8-76aa6aae7404@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Matt Browne SFW  <matt.h.browne@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >
> >The assumptions are the following: Four weeks before the impact, it's
> >clear the comet will hit the Eastern United States. Every day the
> >comet's trajectory can be calculated more precisely. Two weeks before
> >it hits, the impact site is narrowed down to Pennsylvania; then a week
> >later it's clear the comet will hit the greater Pittsburgh area. The
> >comet is big and fast enough to affect the entire Eastern United
> >States area (almost 1 km in size, traveling at 40 km/s). This scenario
> >is depicted in the movie "Impact Earth" (available on DVD). Here's a
> >description:
> >
> 	http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
> 
> 	Plugging in the numbers, that breaks windows in Toronto.

Handy gizmo...

Looks like about 2 minutes after impact, Chicago sees a magnitude 8.3 
earthquake, 5 minutes after impact, the dust starts falling, and half an 
hour after impact, any intact windows blow out as the air-shock finally 
arrives. I suspect "Chicago gets leveled" is a pretty close estimate, 
since I doubt there's much of anything there that's capable of dealing 
with an 8.3 shaker... (Heck, there's stuff in California that wouldn't 
cope with an 8.3...)

I'm not sure about the earthquake though... That page doesn't really 
make clear whether the ground-shake is "as felt at distance entered", or 
if it means "at point of impact" - Although I doubt anybody is going to 
notice much at the impact site, since, according to the calculations, 
that's going to turn into a roughly half mile deep by 13 mile wide 
crater paved with about 150 feet of molten rock...

Detroit, on the other hand, is definitely toast... Between the "cookout" 
starting at .5 seconds after the hit, and the blast damage that arrives 
17 minutes later, it's game over. And let's not even discuss the 
earthquake damage, since Detroit is probably even worse off than Chicago 
as far as seismic hardening. At the very least, both Lake Erie and 
Ontario are going to be slo****ng around pretty bad - I'd expect that the 
tsunami that gets funneled up the west end should put out the fires in 
Detroit - and wash a good bit of whatever remains of the town halfway to 
Lansing... (Which is going to be having problems of its own with the 
fires and blast effects...)

Toledo's in a world of hurt, too...

And Cedar Point ain't gonna be running the roller coasters that summer!

-- 
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