The gigantic asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA has just released a video simulation showing the propagation of waves through oceans and land at the time.
The mega tsunami that occurred immediately after the crash of theasteroidasteroid caused waves several kilometers high. This event was also estimated to be 30,000 times more powerful than the historic tsunami of 2004, which caused between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths.
Essential for understanding and… anticipating
The NOAANOAA just released a video simulation of the mega tsunami with waves spreading across the oceans at the time. This obviously represents the Earth as it was at the time of the dinosaurs: in black, the continents, 66 million years ago, compared to what they are today (white lines).
The colorscolors of the propagating tsunami represent the amplitude of the waves: in red, the positive amplitude whose estimate is between 1.6 km and 4.5 km; in blue, the negative amplitude, the deepening of the waves below their base level. In addition to using a computer simulationcomputer simulation To recreate the mega tsunami, scientists were checking geological data from more than 100 sites around the world to confirm the extent of the disaster caused by the waves.
NOAA believes that this simulation is essential to understand what would happen if, nowadays, a new similar asteroid were to crash into Earth…
Here is the first simulation of the megatsunami created by the impact of the dinosaur-killing asteroid
Article written on 1is January 2023, by Karine Durand
NOAA has released a map showing the wave propagation wave of the tsunami triggered by the asteroid that fell in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago.
The asteroid that wiped out about 75% of animal and plant life on Earth fell into the Gulf of Mexico. It triggered a mega tsunami that spread across several oceans, but not with the same intensity. NOAA’s Tsunami Research Center has developed a map showing the wave propagation wave around the world. For this, they used a computer model to simulate the first 10 minutes of the tsunami.
The scale is in centimeters, in order to show the impact, however small, on the most distant areas. The map nevertheless has a weakness: its scale does not exceed 1,000 cm, or 10 meters, and from this threshold, the color remains the same. However, the asteroid caused waves with a height of at least 1.5 km around its impact zone.
30,000 times more energy than in the 2004 tsunami
L’energyenergy of this tidal wave was 30,000 times stronger than that of the major tsunami of December 2004 which killed 230,000 people. While an average tsunami has a vitessevitesse of propagation of less than one centimeter per second, that which occurred 66 million years ago would have had a speed of 20 centimeters per second in the North Atlantic and the Pacific. The authors of the study point out that these data are very useful for understanding the impact that the fall of a new asteroid of similar size in the ocean would have…
