This has been predicted countless times before, and each time it has been a bust. Complete hype on slow news days. Locally, in April 2014, we did have an entire mountain slide off, unannounced, killing scores of people and massive destruction. Obummer even flew out for it. How many times has the media reported we're in direct path of a meteor hit, or earthquake, or the entire west coast is about to fall of the continent into the Pacific? Must be a slow news day.
Every 'shooting star' is an asteroid 'hitting the planet' or just skipping off our atmosphere and back out. But asteroids hit us every day as the 'fireball sky monitoring' thing checks for. Every night a dozen or several dozen impacts occur. And just about once a week a minivan sized one hits with atomic bomb level intensity.
It's a real threat. Ask the Russians in Cherbylinksk (s).
Unhuh. Those dozens of shooting stars you speak of hitting in the night actually burn up before or as they enter the earth's atmosphere. Read a bit of science and forget the sensationalism. It's so unattractive and boyish.
Sutter's Mill meteorite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"A consortium of over 50 scientists investigated the circumstances of the impact and the properties of the meteorites.[9] The event was recorded by two infrasound monitoring stations of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s International Monitoring System.[21] The preliminary analysis are indicative of energy yield of approximately
4 kilotons of TNT equivalent.[21] Hiroshima's "Little Boy" had a yield of about 16 kt. The meteoroid was probably between the size of a dish washer[22] and a mini van.[23] The air burst had approximate coordinates of 37°36′N 120°30′W / 37.6°N 120.5°W / 37.6; -120.5."
That wasn't over Russia or someone we don't like, that was over California 3 or so years ago.
"Though dinosaur-killing impacts are rare, large asteroids routinely hit the Earth. In the visualization above, you can see the location of 26 space rocks that slammed into our planet between 2000 and 2013, each releasing energy equivalent to that of some of our most powerful nuclear weapons.
The video comes from the B612 Foundation, an organization that wants to build and launch a telescope that would spot civilization-ending asteroids to give humans a heads up in trying to deflect them. To figure out where asteroids were hitting our planet, B612 used data from a worldwide network of instruments that detect infrasound, low-frequency sound waves traveling through the atmosphere. Such measurements have been used since the 1950s to detect nuclear bomb explosions and can also pick up the tremendous burst of a bolide tearing through our atmosphere.
The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which operates the network, recently released the location of these asteroid strikes, which gives scientists another datapoint in understanding the frequency with which these events happen. In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that the Earth gets hit by enormous space rocks more often than we previously thought.
The 26 strikes in the video above were each between 1 and 600 kilotons. For comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of 16 kilotons, and the U.S.’s most powerful nuclear weapon, the B83 bomb, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons. Of course, comparing asteroids to nuclear bombs is a bit misleading; asteroids generate a moving shockwave that can cause far more destruction than the rock itself.
Just to dial back your ever-increasing sense of anxiety here–asteroid impacts are almost always harmless. A Hiroshima-scale asteroid explosion happens in our atmosphere on average once a year and yet we’re all still here. Moreover, asteroids can’t aim themselves at populated centers. Most of the Earth’s surface is water and even a large percentage of land is fairly uninhabited by humans. Though B612’s Ed Lu mentions in the video that only “blind luck” is preventing a catastrophic city-size space rock from killing us, keep in mind that blind luck has actually been serving us fairly well so far.
Still, the well-publicized explosion over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia last year serves as a reminder that these events can be quite destructive. It would do us good to be on the lookout for them."
A Map of Every Nuke-Scale Asteroid Strike From the Last Decade
Usual MIRV warhead on current ICBMs is 400 kilotons.
