Disaster
A little something that came to me the other day...
The chunk of nickel-iron spun slowly in the vacuum. As such things go there wasn't anything special about it.
It was around one hundred meters along various axes. Likely broken off some larger body far in the past.
Wherever it had originated, it was approaching an encounter with another body. Earth, the inhabitants called it.
It wasn't large enough nor moving fast enough to be a "dinosaur killer". It was going to impact at around 30 km/sec. The blast would only be ten megatons or so. Not anything of more than local importance.
Alas, due to the impact point, it was going to be a lot more than a "local" disaster.
Unfortunately for humanity, it struck almost directly above the center of the magma chamber under the Yellowstone caldera.
Not only did it blast through the cap rock, it fractured most of it. so all the pressure that had been building for thousands of years released at once. and the trapped gases in the magma turned it to ash as the massive blast the mere 10 megaton one had triggered broke the pieces of the overlying rock into smaller and smaller pieces.
They'd still be quire large enough to cause lots of damage when they came down..
So would the blast effects.
But the ash, and later steam as various rivers tried to flow back into the immense crater where the magma chamber had been were what caused the lasting damage.
Global warming wasn't going to be a concern for quite some time...
This entry was originally posted at https://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1076731.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
The chunk of nickel-iron spun slowly in the vacuum. As such things go there wasn't anything special about it.
It was around one hundred meters along various axes. Likely broken off some larger body far in the past.
Wherever it had originated, it was approaching an encounter with another body. Earth, the inhabitants called it.
It wasn't large enough nor moving fast enough to be a "dinosaur killer". It was going to impact at around 30 km/sec. The blast would only be ten megatons or so. Not anything of more than local importance.
Alas, due to the impact point, it was going to be a lot more than a "local" disaster.
Unfortunately for humanity, it struck almost directly above the center of the magma chamber under the Yellowstone caldera.
Not only did it blast through the cap rock, it fractured most of it. so all the pressure that had been building for thousands of years released at once. and the trapped gases in the magma turned it to ash as the massive blast the mere 10 megaton one had triggered broke the pieces of the overlying rock into smaller and smaller pieces.
They'd still be quire large enough to cause lots of damage when they came down..
So would the blast effects.
But the ash, and later steam as various rivers tried to flow back into the immense crater where the magma chamber had been were what caused the lasting damage.
Global warming wasn't going to be a concern for quite some time...
This entry was originally posted at https://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1076731.html. Please comment there using OpenID.