Thread: What would be the effects of a space rock the size of Manhattan slamming into one of the oceans?

Short term and long term. How would it affect the ocean? Would it matter which ocean? I assume there wouldn't be the dust cloud that accompanied the Yucatan event. Might such an event have been responsible for the Deluge?

Short term? Death.

It depends on the density, the speed, the composition, etc. of the rock itself.

You could have a somewhat hollow rock that is flying relatively slow and is made of ice; the damage would be severe (maybe the Eastern part of the U.S., Canada, and some of Greenland would be adversely affected, but it wouldn't be anything close to a full rock made of iron ore flying at an incredible speed, which would likely end all life on Earth.

@ Satan Claws: THANKS, that's a banging website. Never know about it before

The end of all life on earth.

Here, try this and see for yourself: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

Satan Claws - "Here, try this and see for yourself: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects?"

There is actually a *much* nicer Flash application, based on the same calculations, available here:

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

The program is, most lamentably and much to my dismay, unavailable for download. I tried saving the program as a .swf, and it *loads*, but it apparently requires supplementary files to do the actual calculation, so it doesn't give any results. <sigh>

I've heard that a large asteroid impact in the ocean would basically be equivalent to an impact on land. With the tremendous speed and heat of the asteroid, it would flash-boil any water in the near vicinity and impact the ocean floor without ever touching water.

The height of the tidal wave/tsunami generated from the impact into an ocean would depend on the speed and direction of the asteroid at the time of impact. Yes, it WOULD matter which ocean it impacted in to the people on the surrounding coastlines .

As I have REPEATEDLY SAID. THE FLOOD/DELUGE was NOT a global event. They were REGIONAL events. Most cultures have a flood story that is based on REAL events with REAL tangible evidence in the geological and archaeological record.