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Arizona ocean waves sunglasses12/4/2023 Office of Naval Research to summarize several decades of research into the hazard posed by waves generated by nuclear explosions. Van Dorn, who lives in San Diego, had been commissioned in 1968 by the U.S. ![]() Melosh mentioned it at a seminar he gave at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography a few years ago, which is where he met tsunami expert William Van Dorn. In addition, Melosh was highly skeptical of estimates that project small asteroids will generate waves that grow to a thousand meters or higher in a 4,000-meter deep ocean.Ĭoncerned that such doubtful information was - and is - being used to justify proposed science projects, Melosh has argued that the hazard of small asteroid-ocean impacts is greatly exaggerated. That record shows only one large tsunami at 7,000 years ago, the Dutch scientists said, but it coincides perfectly in time to a giant landslide off the coast of Norway and is not the result of an asteroid-ocean impact. While on sabbatical in Amsterdam in 1996, Melosh checked with Dutch geologists who had drilled to basement rock in the Rhine River delta, a geologic record of the past 10,000 years. Mayo Greenberg, who since has died, countered that people living below sea level in the Netherlands for the past millennium had not experienced such tsunamis every 250 years as the theory predicted, Melosh noted.īut scientists at the time either didn't follow up or they didn't listen, Melosh added. ![]() The idea that asteroids as small as 100 meters across pose a serious threat to humanity because they create great, destructive ocean waves, or tsunamis, every few hundred years was suggested in 1993 at a UA-hosted asteroids hazards meeting in Tucson.Īt that meeting, a distinguished Leiden Observatory astrophysicist named J. NASA funds NEAT, LINEAR and the UA Spacewatch programs in this effort.) (The current NASA-funded effort to search and map truly hazardous Earth-approaching asteroids - those one kilometer or larger in diameter - is now half done and on track to be finished by the end of the decade, Melosh noted. It will save taxpayers the cost of financing searches for small Earth-approaching asteroids, a savings of billions of dollars, Melosh said. Given all life's worries, new evidence that asteroids smaller than a kilometer in diameter won't generate catastrophic tsunamis is welcome news, and not only for coast dwellers. His talk, "Impact-Generated Tsunamis: an Over-Rated Hazard," is part of the session, "Poking Holes: Terrestrial Impacts." Jay Melosh is talking about it today (March 17) at the 34th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas. University of Arizona planetary scientist H. Naval Research report on explosion-generated tsunamis and terrestrial evidence. Small asteroids do not make great ocean waves that will devastate coastal areas for miles inland, according to both a recently released 1968 U.S.
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