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From: RSchatte <RSchatte@aol.com> [Rebecca]
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 09:59:46 EST
Fwd Date: Thu, 08 Jan 1998 14:39:35 -0500
Subject: AP: Study - Asteroid Could Flood Coast

From: AOL News <AOLNews@aol.com>
Subject: Study: Asteroid Could Flood Coast
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 03:33:59 EST

Study: Asteroid Could Flood Coast

.c The Associated Press

 By PAUL RECER

WASHINGTON (AP) - If a 3-mile-wide rock from space smashed into
the Atlantic Ocean it would drown most of the upper East Coast in
the largest tidal wave in recorded history, a study finds.

Astrophysicist Jack Hills of the Los Alamos National Laboratory,
heading a team to investigate such things, said Wednesday
findings by his group leads to the conclusion that such a
disaster from outer space is not far-fetched.

Any 100-year period, a lifetime for many people, has a 2 percent
to 3 percent chance that an asteroid would splash into either the
Pacific or Atlantic ocean and cause widespread coastal flooding.

An asteroid striking water at thousands of miles an hour could
send a 300-foot-tall wall of water racing across the ocean at the
speed of a jet plane, Hills said. The wave would stop only after
it smashed ashore, and as the water retreated over many square
miles, it would scour the land, rip apart buildings, erode vast
areas.

The result, Hills said: disaster.

``The damage would be unprecedented in human history,'' said
Hills, speaking at the national meeting of the American
Astronomical Society. ``It would kill millions of people and
cause billions in damage.''

Based on computer simulations of what would ensue if an asteroid
smashed into the central Atlantic, Hills said all of Delaware,
Maryland and Virginia would be inundated. In New York, Long
Island and Manhattan would be swamped.

Florida would sustain little damage. Hills said shallow water on
a gently sloping continental shelf would protect the Sunshine
State. All except Miami, which lies on a deep bay that would
suddenly rise up and wash away the city.

Across the Atlantic, the coasts of France, Portugal and part of
Spain would be drowned. England, protected by a shallow waters,
would be little affected.

A Pacific Ocean asteroid strike midway between Hawaii and San
Francisco would launch an ocean wave that would roll over much of
Honolulu and flood the Los Angeles basin, bisecting Santa
Catalina Island. Across the Pacific, such a wave would wash away
coastal cities and towns in Japan, a country that already has
lost thousands of lives to tidal waves, or tsunamis, caused by
earthquakes.

Hills estimated on the basis of his studies that an asteroid more
than 600 feet in diameter will strike one of the Earth's oceans
at least once every 3,000 to 5,000 years. If a person lives for
100 years, then there is about one chance in 50 of being alive
when an asteroid tidal wave occurs, he said.

Hills said geologists have found evidence of such occurrences in
the past. The impact of an asteroid several miles in diameter is
thought to have helped wipe out the dinosaurs 65 million years
ago.

In Hawaii, geologists have found ocean coral deposited on a
hillside 90,000 years ago by a tsunami that may have been 1,000
feet high.

Hills said that if an asteroid ocean strike were detected, people
would have no more than three hours' warning before the mountain
of water traveling hundreds of miles an hour rolled over land.

Astronomical satellites possibly could detect an approaching
asteroid, said Hills, but current technology could not prevent
Earth from being smashed.

AP-NY-01-08-98 0331EST

Copyright 1997 The Associated Press.  The information  contained
in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten
or otherwise distributed without  prior written authority of The
Associated Press.