The biggest threat to humanity, far bigger than global warming/climate change, is about to get bigger, much bigger
A press release from some former NASA astronauts on the current asteroid impact threat to earth, based on data on in-atmosphere detonations since 2001, gleaned from a nuclear weapon detonation detection system has yielded some startling numbers.
The threat is 3 to 10 times higher than previously predicted. The data will be presented at the Seattle Flight Museum, Tuesday April 22, at 6:00pm PDT.
Just last night, another fireball was seen over Russia, caught on a dashcamera. See video.
Now it becomes apparent why this press release is important.
This Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, three former NASA astronauts will present new evidence that our planet has experienced many more large-scale asteroid impacts over the past decade than previously thought… three to ten times more, in fact. A new visualization of data from a nuclear weapons warning network, to be unveiled by B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu during the evening event at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, shows that “the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck.”
Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world, far from populated areas, made evident by a nuclear weapons test warning network. In a recent press release B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu states:
“This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts. It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare—but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought. The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck. The goal of the B612 Sentinel mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them.”
In partnership with Ball Aerospace, the B612 Foundation will build, launch, and operate an infrared space telescope to find and track the hundreds of thousands of threatening asteroids that cannot be tracked with current telescopes. See the mission pager here
Read the press release at:http://b612foundation.org/news/b612-press-conference-on-protecting-earth-from-asteroid-impacts/
h/t to reader “Mac the Knife”.
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A marine impact associated with onset of the Pleistocene glaciations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltanin_impact
Geological evidence show earth has been hit by large meteors (5 km diameter) every 10 to 20 million years. The last big hit was 35 million years ago. We are overdue to be hit again. NASA has mapped out the trajectories of < 1,000 big Near Earth Objects in the asteroid belt. There is still < 100 NEOs in the asteroid belt that can hit earth. However, NASA has not searched the Kuiper belt which has over 100,000 objects and the Oort cloud which has over a trillion objects.
BTW these large meteors can cause tsunamis higher than the Empire State Building. We have never seen this kind of catastrophe since man evolved from apes.
“…our planet has experienced many more large-scale asteroid impacts over the past decade than previously thought… three to ten times more, in fact.”
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Have any alarmists made the claim that climate change is causing more asteroid impacts? If not, it’s just a matter of time.
Louis
Have any alarmists made the claim that climate change is causing more asteroid impacts? If not, it’s just a matter of time.
Absolutely – model projections predict that global warming shall cause the atmosphere to expand as it heats, increasing the risk of dragging meteors down onto our heads.
The catastrophe that will wipe out humanity is unlikely to be man made – naturally.
CodeTech says:
April 19, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Darby, compared to Win8, Vista was great.
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Google “Classic Shell”, Makes W8 look like W7 or even XP. Much easier to live with W8 now.
Dr. Strangelove says:
April 19, 2014 at 5:11 pm
“We are overdue to be hit again.”
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Not necessarily. No matter how any heads you toss, chances of next tossing tails remain 1/2. Asteroid collisions would first need to be shown to be of non-random frequency to make such a claim, and your 35mya collision goes against the usual 100my or so frequency claim. –AGF
See Judith Curry yesterday, or the add on wrap she says she will post soon.
Some things are so improbable they are not worth insuring against. The 2014 March Madness perfect bracket is a great example where Warren Buffet made money at ‘asteroid’ expense.
Please do not take this bog in that direction.
FWIW, it’s not the Seattle museum. It’s The Museum of Flight. At one time it was know as the Boeing Museum of Flight. http://www.museumofflight.org/event/2014/apr/22/saving-earth-keeping-big-asteroids-away-earth-day-presentation-astronauts-tom-jone
What are the chances of a meteorite taking down a commercial jet?
35 million years does agree with the timing that Raup and Seposky found.
A very large impact on land would do us some serious damage. A very large impact in the middle of the Pacific ocean, would cause some serious ripples that would travel right around the world taking out every thing in it’s path. Goodbye most of us. Has happened before.
There were three different 5 km wide asteroid impacts 35.5 million years ago. There is no evidence that there was any impacts on the climate from these impacts. The data has 1000 year resolution here and there is no change in the numbers. It was not a good day on planet Earth during those impact days, but these were not extinction events.
It looks like Earth has only been hit by the really devastating 10 km asteroids about 2 or 3 times that we know of. Obviously more than that, but there are no impact craters for the 10 km extinction level events other than 2 of them. The really really bad 50 km wide comet impacts don’t seem to have ever happened that we know about. Large comets coming in at faster speed are the biggest issue, potentially eliminating all life on the planet, including bacteria living deep in the crust.
The question becomes what do we do about the large asteroids that we find. If it is 3 kms wide, do we just take the impact. Easier than 50 smaller impacts causing wide-spread devastation. We have to make sure all the parts miss the Earth. If it is 10 km wide, we better try to stop it. Only people living in mines for 5 years would survive this size. But we don’t want to turn a 10 km impact into 10000 smaller impacts. We still don’t know what the best solution is.
The Descent Promenade of the Gods to Battle (transliteration)
Think (i.e. remember hearing Les Préludes). I’lll add that as a bit of fun ;-).
Ha ha
Their claim that the threat from asteriods is ‘3-10 times higher than previously predicted’ is a data hockeystick.
Sounds like a sales pitch to me.
@Ric Werme 4:31 pm:
The first part of hunter’s statement is more or less correct, if he was meaning Tunguska and Chelyabinsk. Many people made the same observation 114 months ago. Hunter DOES say, “and now the two most recent…”, so I think I am reading him right as to Chelyabinsk and Murmansk being the ones being “in less than 12 months.” (Actually 14 months, though…)
You including Tunguska by name when he had not mentioned it is a bit off kilter (me, too). Between his tw0 events in 12 months [sic], Chelyabkinsk and Murmansk are almost on the same latitude (averaged to the nearest degree, they ARE), but 2400 km apart.
That part is a bit freaky.
For comparison’s sake Murmansk-Chelyabinsk are about as close as NYC to Oklahoma City; while Americans think that is not “the same region” many people around the world consider them part of America which is only about 5% of the land area of the world, so it might depend on one’s perspective. Chelyabinsk-Tunguska is about the same as NYC-Amarillo, just a bit further. with the same points being made about the 5% American “region” and perspective…
IIRC there was a second “Tunguska” airburst event in around 1932, but it was over the South African rainforest and higher up so it did less damage.
It looks like the Holocene Impact Working Group may have been vindicated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_Impact_Working_Group
I am surprised at the lack of knowledge of the work stemming from that of Clube and Napier exhibeted by those who have already commented. If they are correct, right now we are in a quiet period. Things were much busier in ancient historical time with the events of that period coming down to us as apocryphal legend.
Larry Ledwick says:
April 19, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for adding perspective. We do not need an asteroid tax.
Your readers, usually a perceptive bunch, are missing the connection to AGW theory. Abrupt climate change that heralded the Younger Dryas cold period, as discovered more or less by Wally Broecker of Columbia, is used to stoke fear that a silent similar “tipping point” may be approaching as a result of CO2 contributions. There might be something to that — if the Younger Dryas had not been caused by an asteroid or comet. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, if proven, would undermine the effort to portray abrupt climate change as a closed system phenomena. As your tormentors at Real Climate acknowledge here:
“Think about it. If it turned out that rapid climate change events are caused by comets, it would imply the climate system is far more stable than we thought, that abrupt climate change events are not part of the inherent variability of climate during glacial periods. That would perhaps allay fears that we could be pushing the system towards an abrupt climate change in the future. On the other hand, it would also suggest that cometary impacts are far far more common than we thought. Now that would be news. Perhaps further research by Kennett, Firestone and others will indeed show that to be the case. We’re not, however, holding our breath. – See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/the-younger-dryas-comet-impact-hypothesis-gem-of-an-idea-or-fools-gold/#sthash.5vngrqLQ.dpuf”
I would note that they are still holding their breath despite dozens of additional confirmations since the blog post was written.
I am a co-author of several of the important papers supporting the YDB hypothesis and we need all the support we can get. Climate skeptics are one of many important constituencies that need to wake up to mankind’s truly greatest threat. Arguing about AGW is like fighting about the radio station while we sit on the train tracks. Asteroids are not so easily blamed on politics or people.
I hate to say it but I doubt anybody’s going to bother doing diddly squat about this because preparing for this would be a strict outlay of money without the ability to make any money. That’s the only reason our world saviors pursue the CAGW meme: It’s very lucrative financially and since that threat is virtually nonexistent it only requires nonexistent remedies, and a nonexistent remedy, by its very definition, is a vanishingly cheap thing to produce but, yeah can you charge for it – hence the financially lucrative aspect.
As an aside:
2900-7300 kilograms per year hit Earth. However, this does not include the small dust particles. Scientists also estimate between 36 and 166 meteorites larger than 10 grams fall to Earth per million square kilometers per year. Over the whole surface area of Earth, that translates to 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites bigger than 10 grams per year. But most meteorites are too small to actually fall all the way to the surface. Estimates for the total mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles. (This study was led by P. A. Bland and was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.)
Just what we need … another science of disaster out to save us all.
Let’s see if I’ve got the math down … 26 explosions since 2001 or 13 years, which comes to an explosion occurring once every six months on average.
There go those darn skeptic alarm bells, such as … what happened every six months for millennia … we had blind luck all that time?
. . . . . . .
~ The upper atmosphere incinerates the vast majority of small and medium sized space rocks that enter it.
~ Any remaining pieces would likely fall onto the oceans (71% of the Earth’s surface), or onto the deserts and arctic areas.
~ Whole sky surveys assure us that there aren’t any *large asteroids* in our neighborhood that we need to be concerned about.
~ Even if there is a large asteroid sometime in the distant future, mankind now has the ability to nudge it into a safer trajectory.
~ There is zero telescopic evidence from the Earth, and satellites, of any other large objects in the inner solar system.
~ There are many thousands of mostly amateur astronomers around the World who would advise us of any other objects.
. . . . . . .
“No one should be overly concerned about an Earth impact of an asteroid or comet. The threat to any one person from auto accidents, disease, other natural disasters and a variety of other problems is much higher than the threat from NEOs [Near Earth Objects]. Over long periods of time, however, the chances of the Earth being impacted are not negligible so that some form of NEO insurance is warranted. At the moment, our best insurance rests with the NEO scientists and their efforts to first find these objects and then track their motions into the future. We need to first find them, then keep an eye on them.”
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/target.html