It was the final film by cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann, who died before the film's release. Deep Impact grossed over $349.5 million worldwide on an $80 million production budget. Both films were similarly received by critics, with Armageddon scoring 43% and Deep Impact scoring 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film depicts the attempts to prepare for and destroy a 7-mile (11 km) wide comet set to collide with Earth and cause a mass extinction.ĭeep Impact was released in the same summer as the similarly themed Armageddon, which fared better at the box office, while astronomers described Deep Impact as being more scientifically accurate. It was released by Paramount Pictures in North America and by DreamWorks Pictures internationally on May 8, 1998. Steven Spielberg served as an executive producer of this film. But now we have more of an understanding about how an ocean impact may go down, we might be able to slightly nudge it toward a new target that will produce less collateral damage, like the middle of the ocean.Deep Impact is a 1998 American science-fiction disaster film directed by Mimi Leder, written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, and starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and Morgan Freeman. If you find an asteroid in this size range is on a collision course with Earth, and you can't deflect it from hitting the Earth's surface, you might be able to deflect it into the middle of the ocean," he said.Īlthough NASA and other agencies are working to identify and track asteroids that pose a significant threat to Earth, we could be blind-sided and have little time to prepare a mission to knock the asteroid off course. Gisler's research adds another layer of understanding of how an asteroid impact would affect Earth and, for asteroids of 300 meters wide or less, we could use an ocean impact as a strategy to limit global damage. RELATED: Huge Tsunamis May Have Ravaged Ancient Mars Intense shock waves and violent winds will also wreak havoc on the surface, so the further the impact is from any populated coastal regions, the better. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas, so the injection of vapor into the stratosphere could linger for months or years, altering global climates. In addition, a significant fraction of the kinetic energy of the impacting asteroid will go into vaporizing huge quantities of water, according to the team's award-winning video explaining the research findings. "That's awfully high! But unless it's very close to a shore, it's not going to be very dangerous." According to the model, a jet of water would also protrude from the ocean's surface by a few kilometers, producing rim waves surrounding the transient water crater reaching 400 meters in height. "They're spectacular to be sure they would produce splashes that go up tens of kilometers ," he added. Tsunamis aren't very dispersive and therefore don't lose energy as they travel through the ocean basin, hitting coastlines hundreds or maybe thousands of kilometers away, often with devastating results.īut that's not to say an asteroid impact in the middle of an ocean wouldn't be dramatic. These shifts cause a huge movement in a massive column of water, from the seabed to the surface, that can create wavelengths of a hundred kilometers or more, said Gisler, which is many times longer than the depth of the ocean (of a few kilometers). Tsunamis occur when there's large scale shifts of mass in the seabed, such during a submarine earthquake or landslide. These dispersive waves in an ocean will be very localized and won't have the energy that a tsunami does. In other words, they lose their energy very quickly. Sure, the energy of the rock hitting the water will produce waves, but the ripples are very dispersive. He likens an asteroid ocean impact to throwing a rock into a pond. "An asteroid impact is a point source and it only affects the immediate region around the impact point and moreover, to create a tsunami, you need something that disturbs the entire water column," said Gisler. Never before has an impact scenario like this been studied in such detail and the simulation revealed that Gisler's original instincts had merit: devastating post-impact tsunamis we see in the movies are as fictional as the science fiction plot lines they are a part of. Gisler is determined to better understand the realities of a massive impact in the ocean and presented his team's findings at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in San Francisco last week, showcasing the dramatic 3-D modeling results of an ocean-impacting asteroid.
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