PLEASE NOTE:
*
BEWARE: THE NEXT GIANT ASTEROID BELT IS OVERDUE
From The Sunday Times, 23 July 2000
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html
A group of scientists known in government circles as "The X
Files
committee" has warned that the Earth is overdue for an
asteroid strike
serious enough to wipe out 10% of its population.
Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, is studying the report by
the Near
earth Objects Taskforce and is expected to announce its findings
within
days. It calls for international co-operation to track asteroids
and
comets likely to cross the Earth's orbit.
The report says the risk of death is about the same as from an
aircraft
crash and similar to a terrestrial accident such as a nuclear
reactor
meltdown. Although strikes are rare, the damage inflicted by a
single
hit could be enormous.
If an asteroid 1km wide landed in the Atlantic Ocean, it would
destroy
most European coastal cities and swamp parts of Britain in a
tidal wave.
If it struck land, it could kill millions and throw up a dust
cloud that
could create and artificial winter lasting years.
An asteroid of that size is likely to hit Earth once every
100,000
years. According to the task force there has been no strike for
at least
that time.
Scientists at the government's atomic weapons establishment at
Aldermaston are devising ways to attack asteroids with nuclear
weapons
to deflect them. Britain is expected to collaborate with its
European
partners to devise a system whereby a series of warheads could be
launched if necessary.
Dr Nigel Holloway, a senior scientist at Aldermaston who advised
the
taskforce, said there was growing acceptance in government of the
need
for countermeasures.
"For a 1-2km asteroid you would use warheads equal to about
100,000
Hiroshimas," he said. "There are disadvantages of
trying to do it with
one big shot because some of these asteroids are rather fragile.
What
you don't want to end up with is buckshot, because you have no
hope of
deflecting that. So you make a devise to 'flash' the asteroid on
one
side with an intense burst of neutron radiation and blow some of
the
surface off to achieve the deflection."
According to well-placed scientific sources, Nasa has already
started
investigating how to detonate such a nuclear warhead with a £
150m "Near
Earth Asteroid" probe.
Lembit Opik, Liberal Democrat MP for Montgomeryshire, whose
grandfather
was an astronomer specialising in cosmic impacts, said: "It
is not a
question of whether an extinction-level will occur, it is when.
Each of
us is 750 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid strike
than to
win the national lottery this weekend."
A 50-metre-wide asteroid that exploded in the air above Siberia
in 1908
destroyed vast areas of forest and caused a dust cloud 10km high
that
affected the climate for years (sic!).
A similar event over central London could kill 7m people and lay
waste
to an area extending outwards as far as the M25.
Dr Harry Atkinson, who chaired the taskforce, declined to comment
on the
findings. The warnings of the report are uncannily similar to the
plots
of the two recent Hollywood films, Armageddon and Deep Impact.
When he set up the committee, Sainsbury said: "We cannot
ignore the
risk, however remote, and a case can be made for monitoring the
situation on an international basis."
Copyright 2000, Times Newspapers Ltd.
----------------------------------------
THE CAMBRIDGE-CONFERENCE NETWORK (CCNet)
----------------------------------------
The CCNet is a scholarly electronic network. To
subscribe/unsubscribe,
please contact the moderator Benny J Peiser <b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk>.
Information circulated on this network is for scholarly and
educational use only. The attached information may not be copied
or
reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the
copyright holders. The fully indexed archive of the CCNet, from
February 1997 on, can be found at
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cccmenu.html