The probability of large asteroid impacts has increased

We are going to have to change what we think about asteroid impacts, because NASA, through the Goddard Space Flight Center, in the voice of its space flight chief James Garvin, has asked to recalculate the chances of a large asteroid impacting the earth, He requests it because he has done a study where he corrects the measurements of several Giant impact craters and warns that correcting this variable then increases the chances that a large asteroid several kilometers in diameter ends up hitting our planet.

This does not mean that it has discovered an asteroid that is on a collision course with us, at the moment there is no known asteroid larger than a kilometer that poses a danger to the earth for at least the next 100 years.

What the researcher did was a statistical examination and he realized that there were serious errors in the measurement of some craters. Specifically, he studied four impacts that had occurred in the last million years, two of them located outside of Latin America, the one in Pantasma in Nicaragua. and that of Iturralde in Bolivia, in addition to another two located in Ghana Africa and Kazakhstan Central Asia.

The impact of Pantasma was poorly measured, initially it was estimated to be 14 km in diameter, but thanks to a new 3D map it has been discovered that the original crater was 33 km in diameter, that changes many things, the impact of an asteroid that has a wingspan it would mean annihilating a big city like Mexico or New York today.

Why is there such a big difference in the measurements, because initially the erosion and movements of the earth's crust were not correctly calculated, which ended up blurring the outer edge of the crater.

The impact that generated the phantom was equivalent to 727,000 megatons and was enough to set fire to part of the earth's atmosphere and distribute the effect of the shock wave and its impact worldwide.

While the Iturralde crater was initially measured to be 9.6 kilometers in diameter, but with the new study it turns out that it originally had a size of 28.9 km, all this means that in the last million years the earth received the impact of at least four asteroids that caused a catastrophe at the continental level and climatic effects on the entire planet.

There could be more to discover or even if they are already known their dimensions are miscalculated, this means that the risk is greater than what was thought until now, although as I said before there are no known risks in the next 100 years but the Tic Tac continues in march, it happened in the past and it will happen in the future, the impact with a large asteroid that creates a crater like Pantasma or Iturralde is only a matter of time.

Therefore, the sooner we are prepared for planetary defense, the better it will be for us, the better it will be for the earth and it will also be a step in our evolution as a civilization.

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