Supercomputer Simulates the Impact of the Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs (zdnet.com) 61
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth on the eastern coast of modern Mexico, resulting in up to three quarters of plant and animal species living on the planet going extinct -- including the dinosaurs. Now, a team of researchers equipped with a supercomputer have managed to simulate the entire event, shedding light on the reasons that the impact led to a mass extinction of life. The simulations were carried out by scientists at Imperial College in London, using high performance computing (HPC) facilities provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The research focused on establishing as precise an impact angle and trajectory as possible, which in turn can help determine precisely how the asteroid's hit affected the surrounding environment.
Various impact angles and speeds were considered, and 3D simulations for each were fed into the supercomputer. These simulations were then compared with the geophysical features that have been observed in the 110-mile wide Chicxulub crater, located in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where the impact happened. The simulations that turned out to be the most consistent with the structure of the Chicxulub crater showed an impact angle of about 60 degrees. Such a strike had the strength of about ten billion Hiroshima bombs, and this particular angle meant that rocks and sediments were ejected almost symmetrically. This, in turn, caused a greater amount of climate-changing gases to be released, including billions of tonnes of sulphur that blocked the sun. The rest is history: firestorms, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes rocked the planet, and most species disappeared from the surface of the Earth. The 60-degree angle constituted "the worse-case scenario for the lethality of the impact" because it maximized the ejection of rock and therefore, the production of gases, the scientists wrote.
"The researchers carried out almost 300 3D simulations before they were able to reach their conclusions, which was processed by the HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 supercomputer located at the University of Leicester," adds ZDNet. "The 14,000-cores system, powered by Intel's Skylake chips, is supported by a 6TB server to accommodate large, in-memory calculations."
Various impact angles and speeds were considered, and 3D simulations for each were fed into the supercomputer. These simulations were then compared with the geophysical features that have been observed in the 110-mile wide Chicxulub crater, located in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where the impact happened. The simulations that turned out to be the most consistent with the structure of the Chicxulub crater showed an impact angle of about 60 degrees. Such a strike had the strength of about ten billion Hiroshima bombs, and this particular angle meant that rocks and sediments were ejected almost symmetrically. This, in turn, caused a greater amount of climate-changing gases to be released, including billions of tonnes of sulphur that blocked the sun. The rest is history: firestorms, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes rocked the planet, and most species disappeared from the surface of the Earth. The 60-degree angle constituted "the worse-case scenario for the lethality of the impact" because it maximized the ejection of rock and therefore, the production of gases, the scientists wrote.
"The researchers carried out almost 300 3D simulations before they were able to reach their conclusions, which was processed by the HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 supercomputer located at the University of Leicester," adds ZDNet. "The 14,000-cores system, powered by Intel's Skylake chips, is supported by a 6TB server to accommodate large, in-memory calculations."
It wasn't only dinosaurs (Score:2)
many plants and marine species died out too.
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How do you know, were you there? -Ken Ham
I was and it was the biggest oh shit moment I have ever experienced. Next to hearing a shot from the bathroom and realizing the General Ripper was not going to give out the recall codes!
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Pffft, history is made by the big and loud.
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many plants and marine species died out too.
Pffft, history is made by the big and loud.
Yeah, ammonites were famously introverted.
Re:So, what's the news here? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you have no idea how simulations work? Got it.
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Ha!...an AC accusing somebody of trolling. You bring a smile to my face as I close out the evening's browsing.
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That supercomputers crunch numbers? Because the rest of the exercise appears to be fitting the experiment to produce the "necessary" results, which isn't exactly "science".
I'm not sure what you thought they were trying to do but if they were trying to answer the question "what angle of entry matches the evidence" then what did you want them to do differently?
Essentially, they're building an hypothesis using a computer.
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There will be a new, cooler video of the impact for the next Discovery special.
14,000 cores? (Score:1)
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More like one ARM CPU with half the cores disabled to save battery.
+1 funny (Score:2)
That's funny.
Heaven's oven (Score:1)
Can it emulate the delicious crispy taste of fried giant reptile?
Dinosaurs are not extinct. (Score:3)
Stop spreading fake news. Dinosaurs are alive and well. Where is that fact checking web site? :)
Re: Dinosaurs are not extinct. (Score:2)
I was wondering how long it would take someone to work in a political comment.
Everyone one of you are deranged.
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Indeed. They are alive and well, but today they are called "Reptilians" and are mistakenly believed by the Illiterati to have come from the Heavens.
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Alligator meat actually looks and tastes very similar to chicken :P
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I saw an interview with a T-Rex about it, he said "I saw this giant flaming asteroid coming down and thought to myself 'oh shit! The economy!'"
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I saw an interview with a T-Rex about it, he said "I saw this giant flaming asteroid coming down and thought to myself 'oh shit! The economy!'"
You appear to think that COVID-19 is an extinction-level event. It's not. It's not even an apocalyptic even.
A truly fucked up economy, though, is as close to apocalyptic as you can get.
Letting COVID-19 run wild with absolutely no lockdowns hardly makes a dent in the human population. Having the economy of Zimbabwe makes COVID-19 look like a walk in the park.
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It was just a joke, lighten up.
Re: Dinosaurs are not extinct. (Score:2)
Some of my ancestors only found an evolutionary niche to survive because of that huge extinction event, you insensitive clod,
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It was just a joke, lighten up.
With you it's really hard to tell - you say outrageous and obviously incorrect things all the time, so it's not clear when you are joking.
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Only in your head. It's your assumptions that are the problem here.
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And the economy gets fucked all the time and recovers. This time will be no different. It might take a while to fully recover once things
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Yes, they are alive and well. My dinosaur feeder is packed most days. Everything from sparrows (a small avian dinosaur) to red-headed woodpeckers (a rather larger, but still small, avian dinosaur).
And don't get me started on the hawks (avian dinosaurs) and corvids (crows, blue jays, etc), which are (again) avian dinosaurs....
Aren't most craters circular? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It partially hit water; that may make a difference.
Re: Aren't most craters circular? (Score:1)
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No.
Well, I'm sure there *is* a discrepancy, but not at that coarse level of detail.
Overall shape is circular (Score:2)
10 billion Hiroshima bombs? (Score:1)
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Using https://www.bookmobile.com/boo... [bookmobile.com] I have estimated the average weight for a hardcover book at 1.14 kg. That is a 8x11 hardcover book with 400 pages and the lightest weight paper. The Library of Congress has 38 million regular books - we'll just skip all of the other stuff for the estimate. This gives us an estimated book mass of 4.3x10^7 kg. The Hiroshima bomb converted approximately 700 milligrams, 0.7g or 0.0007kg, to e
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A planet killer has to destroy the planet, a evironment and climate altering asteroid, disrupts the ecology sufficient to create a mass extinction event, with only those surviving who can adapt to the new environment and climate. The asteroid did not kill the dinosaurs, technically the altered climate the asteroid created and altered environment killed the majority of species of dinosaur because they could not adapt to the altered conditions.
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A planet killer has to destroy the planet, a evironment and climate altering asteroid, disrupts the ecology sufficient to create a mass extinction event, with only those surviving who can adapt to the new environment and climate.
~rtb61
Technically correct is the best correct, but a George R. Stewart's Earth Abides spirituality is the outcome of your nitpicking. I'm a secular Humanist...and Trans-humanist stalwart. If God had intended us to walk...rollerskates...Gene Wilder point-of-view-kinda-guy about this planet.
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You can not adapt over night ... ...
No idea why people always come up with the "adapt" misconception.
You get an asteroid on your head, you are dead.
You are 1000 miles away, the firewall kills you 60 seconds later.
You are 10,000 miles away, the toxic rain kills you.
You are on the other side of the planet, the eternal night will kill you: no food, too cold.
No brainers
Why you throw in "could not adapt" is beyond me.
The only things that survived are those that already were adapted to that awful conditions.
No one cares (Score:3)
Spare us your cut and paste inclusivity speech. This isn't the comment section of The Guardian or The NYTimes, you won't get any brownie points for your cliched virtue signalling here.
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Are you on drugs or just another Aspie?
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Spare us your cut and paste inclusivity speech. This isn't the comment section of The Guardian or The NYTimes, you won't get any brownie points for your cliched virtue signalling here.
In reply to a rant starting with "Many men of my generation participate". Perhaps, for some reason, you have become paranoid and see inclusivity and virtue signalling where it's not present?
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Perhaps, for some reason, you have become paranoid and see inclusivity and virtue signalling where it's not present?
Maybe OP was accurate in detecting the virtue-signalling; after all the original poster replied with:
Tenure in American universities is perverse with privilege, statistically and anecdotally. The abuses women have suffered are barely reported.
Seems like you were the one who missed the GPs meaning, not the OP.
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Sir, you appear to have been trolled.
Movies (Score:3, Informative)
Their asteroid looks too big (Score:2)
IIRC it was 6 miles (10km) in diameter and probably not spherical either. Yet the impactor in this sim appears to be 16/17 km in diameter and spherical making it much larger and heavier. Am I missing something here?
Spelling (Score:2)
'worse-case', really?
You could do this also with an ENIAC... (Score:3)