By Scott Longman
Field Ethos publishes on any number of recurring themes. One of them is that once any of us ventures past the fringes of civilization, we are no longer the apex of the food chain. Nor are we, looking more broadly, in control of any other force of nature, from storms to rockslides to riptides, among a great many others. Well, it turns out that concept still applies even within the confines of civilization. And, worse yet, it’s global.
When pop singer Adele wrote her enormous hit “Skyfall,” she probably wasn’t thinking about actual skyfall.
Maybe she should have been.
As I write this, I am physically sitting over the crater of a cataclysmic meteor hit, from about 300 million years ago. It was originally denoted as “The Des Plaines Disturbance,” after some drillers encountered some very odd, very deep rock formations. That ultimately turned out to be a five-mile-wide hole in the Earth. Five miles. For comparison, the radically largest nuke the U.S. ever set off, the Castle Bravo shot, left a comparatively paltry 1.2-mile crater. The reason I didn’t know about the crater when I bought this house is only that the entire thing had been bulldozed in by glaciers across several ice ages. That, and I had a really smooth real estate agent.
Similarly, but vastly larger, most people are familiar with the Chicxulub meteor, that being the one with a permanent time-share just off the Yucatan peninsula. It produced a heavyweight crater about 120 miles across and was so globally disastrous at to broom out most of the scalies and give our furry forefathers a chance to evolve into us, without worrying about Snarfasaurus Rex.
Of course, it’s easy to relegate all that to the “Well, that’s all quite long ago, and doesn’t effect us now” bin.
To the unfortunate contrary.
A Clear & Present Danger
The meteor threat is alive and well, and always will be. Spaceship Earth is riddled with impacts, with most of them filled in or grown over, so you can’t see them. In contrast, all you have to do is take a look at the absolutely hammered face of the far-smaller-than-us moon to know that impacts have always existed. And more scarily, they have happened even in very recent history.
A nasty light-heavyweight meteor hit as recently as 1908, in a place called Tunguska, Siberia. Russia is immense, spanning eleven time zones to our own paltry four. To this day, Tunguska is remote, but in 1908, it was about as easy to get to as third base with my first girlfriend. Between its utter inaccessibility and the churning upheaval of Russian politics, it took until 1922 until some enterprising guy named Leonid Kulik actually played the science card and went stomping out there.
What he and his expedition found was mindboggling.
If you’ve ever seen a car run into even a modestly sized tree — I’ve been first guy on those sad scenes, twice — you know that the tree wins. Trees, at least healthy ones, are really, really hard to knock down, and the bigger they are, the tougher they are. But this meteoric force had knocked down an incomprehensibly immense 800 square miles of old-growth trees, some with a diameter as big as a full meter.
Although the shape of the overall destruction was irregular, the square miles translate to an area of about 28 miles by 28 miles. Overlay that on any major world city, and the answer is . . . it’s gone.
Gone out of the literal blue.
Not If, But When
Meteors happen all the time. The magnificent armor of our atmosphere defeats the overwhelming majority of the lesser ones. They often appear to us as “shooting stars,” basically a speeding rock that fully burns up on entry. Some do, however, make it through to punch holes in, among other things, cars and roofs.
In one notably funny case in which nobody was hurt, a meteor (technically, once it touches down, it’s a “meteorite”) blew through a homeowner’s roof, but did not have enough remaining kinetic energy to punch through the floor of her bedroom. It instead, however, apparently had lots of rotational energy, because it shot across her floor, climbed the wall, and got in an awful tiff with her venetian blinds, as she sat frozen in bed watching it. We do have to wonder WTF crossed her mind.
But they often aren’t funny, as demonstrated most recently by the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013.
That piece of skyfall was captured on multiple cameras, and it’s worth YouTubing up.
The tragedy is that most folks watching it just stood there. Few sought cover, and miserably, many watched it through windows. Often, meteors don’t make it to the ground: they become so incomprehensibly hot that they cataclysmically detonate mid-air. The Tunguska one did. So, too, did the Chelyabinsk one. The shockwave blew in glass and destroyed buildings. More than 1,500 souls were injured by it, many by fragmented glass in the face. Some were blinded.
SO, we have to live with the prospect, not merely historic, but present and continuing.
But does it mean we are wholly helpless?
The answer, at least at this point in technology is strategically yes, but tactically, no.
Strategically, despite recent advances in technology — to include landing a probe on an asteroid — do we have the technology to stop them? The real answer is no. The first problem is simply seeing them at all: they are dark and non-reflective, so only in the full rays of the sun can we spot them. There’s a large area where we simply can’t see them at all. Indeed, on the day the Chelyabinsk meteor hit, the astronomy community was intently tracking a different asteroid that would pass near Earth — but never saw the Chelyabinsk one coming. That’s not a fault of attention, but rather one of optics and physics.
So, like the ‘90s movies, can we nuke them? In a word, no. There are lots of reasons, all beyond the scope of this article, but no.
So, what does that leave us with as an immediate action drill? If you see the damn thing inbound, WTF do you do?
The effectiveness of reaction is deeply dependent on a bunch of circumstances. The two biggies are, one, how big is it, and two, how far away is it? But once we get that out of the way, the drill is pretty direct.
Skyfall Survival Guide
1. Recognize it. Understand what it is. Consistent accounts describe a descending column, often orange, sometimes fiery. Other accounts describe a blue column following the object, perhaps having to do with ionization.
2. Expect shockwave. Once you see that, expect a massive blast wave to follow, even if the space rock appears far off. Because light travels — at least for any practical purposes — instantly, you will see the meteor inbound sometimes far, far before its brutal effects intrude on the lime in your beer. In Chelyabinsk, it was sometimes 90 seconds from seeing it blow up to the arrival of the crushing shockwave. That’s potentially a lifesaving 90 seconds, at least if you know what to do.
3. No windows. Immediately get TF away from windows.
4. Get to blast shadow. If you can, get into some form of blast and frag shadow. That might be a basement, it might be behind a building. Terrain features — hills — are to be preferred over buildings because buildings can and do collapse, but very few hills ever do.
5. Once your party is secured, communicate, 911 or the country equivalent. Yep, you might simply be adding to the comms overload, but if you see it and understand it before anybody else, you might just save lives of your fellows.
Can we fix this threat? No. Can we, consistent with training and preparation, take steps to mitigate it? Yes. That pretty well encompasses the human condition.
