What Happens When an Asteroid Hits An Ocean

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Paintballs Clarify What Happens When an Asteroid Hits Earth’s Ocean

Quote

Coastal waves from mid-sized asteroid impacts might be more like a storm surge than a wall of watery destruction, according to NASA experiments with paintballs.

When an asteroid hits the ocean, it's more likely to produce storm-surge-sized waves than giant walls of watery death. That's the preliminary result of an experiment that used paintballs to help clear up some of the confusion around what happens when a space rock splashes into the ocean.

Asteroids come in all sizes, from small 100-meter-wide airbursters to the 10-kilometer giant that decimated the dinosaurs. To understand the ensuing tsunamis from impacts, researchers focused on the mid-range objects, asteroids between about 100 to 1000 meters across.

  Read More: Sky and Telescope

 

[Piney]

A lot of North American impacts hit the Atlantic. Or the prehistoric shallow sea that cut the continent in half. 

https://www.impactcraters.us/

https://visual.ly/community/infographic/geography/meteor-impacts-north-america

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_in_North_America