Various & Sundry

Rather horrifying...here's the description I got along w/ the link:

"It¹s an impressive animation of what would happen if an asteroid < about 500
miles across or so < impacts the Earth today. It is estimated that an
asteroid this size has hit the Earth about 4 times in it's past. The visuals
are stunning, and someone set it to excellent music for the action. The
video was part of a science program called "Miracle Planet" on the Science
Channel.

Anyway, its depiction of a massive impact is unflinching and brutal. I¹ll
stress right here that the odds of anything this size hitting us even in the
next million years are slim to none. We know of every asteroid this size in
the solar system out to terrific distances, and none is slated to ruin our
day (or millennium).

But an impact like this would wipe out everything. Everything. As far as I
can tell, the depiction there is pretty accurate. Notice how the impact
appears to be in slow motion­ in reality, the speed is something like 10-20
miles per second. It¹s just that the rock is so big, five-hundred miles
across, things appear to move slowly. The expanding ring of death is moving
faster than the speed of sound, over 700 miles an hour. The ocean crest
Tsunami at the edge rises about 40 to 50 miles high before it vaporizes. You
can see the island of Japan and continents lifting up as the shock wave
moves through them, vaporizing water, rock, metal. The oceans boil, the
crust melts, and, well. There you go.

The only real error I saw, I think, is when the shock wave encircling the
Earth finally closes up when it reaches the opposite side of the planet from
the impact point (about 1 day after the impact). The shock would eject a
plume from the other side, like squeezing a watermelon seed between two
fingers. We see evidence of this on other bodies; ringed features opposite
giant impact craters, where the shock wave from the impact converged on the
other side of the world."

Sent to me by my ex-roommate Jeff.