Meteor hits Chelyabinsk, Russia. Insane videos ensue.

[Guinness]

If it were the size of a house we'd be in deep sh*t. I heard 2-4 meters.

Hmm, I thought they had to get up to the size of a football field for us, globally, to be in deep sh*t. Not that the size of a house would be jim-dandy or anything...

Possibly... but I'm a lot closer than you.

Ah, yes. "We" takes on a different dimension under those circumstances.

[MRandall25]

If it were the size of a house we'd be in deep sh*t. I heard 2-4 meters.

Hmm, I thought they had to get up to the size of a football field for us, globally, to be in deep sh*t. Not that the size of a house would be jim-dandy or anything...

An asteroid the size of a house has roughly the same power as the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (20 kilotons, though no word on what they consider to be a "normal" house size).

A 200-foot asteroid would be about 25-50 megatons. For comparison, Tsar Bomba was 57 megatons (most powerful nuke ever detonated). So say the football field is 360 feet. That would be about 62 megatons (calculator here: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/)

A mile-wide asteroid would destroy a 100-200 mile radius, while also causing damage 1,000 miles away from ground zero. It would block out the sun, which will kill somethings, but if it would kill humans, I'm not sure.

I took the benchmarks above from Google, and made the one calculation with guesses.

[Gaucho]

The interwebs is awesome.

[MRandall25]

I found a better calculator (same people, but now with flash animation!):

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

For ****s and giggles:

An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building (381 m):

6.59 x 10e3 megatons. The average time interval between impacts of this size during the last 4 billion years is 1 x 10e5 years.

Crater is 4.5 miles across and 1760 feet deep.

If you were 50 miles from it (arbitrary number I came up with), you'd receive 2nd-degree burns. Trees, paper, and grass would catch on fire.

The earthquake arrives 16.1 seconds after impact at an intensity of 7.2. It's felt, but doesn't really do much damage to well-built structures.

The shockwave arrives in 4 minutes. Max wind velocity is 164 mph. Wood-frame buildings get knocked over, glass shatters, 90% of trees knocked over.


The internet is truly wonderful.

[KennyTheKangaroo]

man, if a legit meteor hits earth we are all royally effed.

[Letang Is The Truth]

/dinosaurs

[Guinness]

The interwebs is awesome.

[bh]

man, if a legit meteor hits earth we are all royally effed.

I'd say it's more of a question of when than if. Hopefully it's way longer than we need to worry about.

[mac5155]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson just on nbc nightly news. Pretty cool guy

[MRandall25]

man, if a legit meteor hits earth we are all royally effed.

I'd say it's more of a question of when than if. Hopefully it's way longer than we need to worry about.

FWIW, most of the ones I ran through that simulator happen on average every 1500+ years.

[tifosi77]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson just on nbc nightly news. Pretty cool guy

He got a nice shout out in the last episode of "Archer".

[Letang Is The Truth]

how did they not know this was occurring?

[Sam's Drunk Dog]

how did they not know this was occurring?

Too small to detect but just big enough to not burn up is my guest.

[bhaw]

dagny posted on her facebook that there was a large meteor (nowhere close to the one in Russia) last night in the San Fran area.

Armageddon is here. We need Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.

[Willie Kool]

[SoupOrSam]

[bh]

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/18/40019 ... h-2300-BCE

Cool map of meteor impacts.