Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have used their supercomputers and a new 3D code to discover the effects of a tsunami caused by an asteroid.
No, it's not a joke. They recently showed their findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Albuquerque. Here is what they found.
The largest asteroid simulated was one kilometer wide. It struck with an impact equal to 1.5 trillion tons of TNT and produced a 12-mile-high wall of water.
The simulation, which took more than one million hours of individual processor time -- three weeks on Los Alamos' Blue Mountain supercomputer and the ASCI White supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- predicted wave velocities of about 380 miles per hour.
I sure hope I'll be far away if such a thing strikes the earth.
Source: Jay Lyman, NewsFactor.com, June 7, 2002
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