Asteroid Toutatis could have...
2004-10-01 10:11
Cape Town - If the giant asteroid Toutatis, which closely missed earth on Wednesday, hit a place such as the Mother City, the entire city and all its suburbs would have disappeared in an instant.
The noise of the impact would have been so loud that people as far away as Johannesburg would have suffered damage to their eardrums and not been able to hear for a long time afterwards, professor Roger Gibson of the University of the Witwatersrand's impact and crater research group said on Thursday.
Toutatis is 4.6km by 2.4km in size and on Wednesday it became the biggest object in space to move past earth in recent history.
Its trajectory took it past the earth at a distance four times as far away as the moon. If a person had been able to stand on Toutatis, earth would have looked the same as the moon looks to us, the official Toutatis website explained.
Should Toutatis have hit earth, the meteor would simply have exploded because of the incredible amount of energy involved. The temperature at the point of impact would have been more than 10 000ºC, Gibson said.
Everything would have melted
Everything in the vicinity would have melted. A crater of between 50km and 100km wide and 2km deep would have appeared within seconds.
Should Toutatis have hit Cape Town, an earthquake would have resulted that would have shaken the entire country and caused damage as far a field as Johannesburg. Cape Town and everything in a 200km radius would have been destroyed. A cloud of dust and rocks would have risen into the air and left the entire Earth in darkness.
Some of the rocks, stones and dust that entered the atmosphere during the explosion would have rained back to earth, Gibson said. Some of these blazing rocks would have caused huge fires all over the world and destroyed forests in their wake.
Because the dust cloud would have filtered the sun's rays, plants would have died and earth would enter a "winter" that could last for months or even years.
Gibson said if a meteor of that size fell into the ocean, the effects could be even more devastating. Huge tsunamis, hundreds of metres high, would wipe out coastal cities and towns all over the globe.
Gibson said statistically a meteor the size of Toutatis should hit earth every 5 to 10 million years and a lot of time and attention were devoted to determine the routes of asteroids.
More than a thousand asteroids of a few kilometres wide and with trajectories taking them close to Earth have been identified but a lot more research is still needed.
E-mail André Gouws