304E-323-Big Splash

To discover what would happen if an asteroid were to strike a large body of water, Dr. Galen Gisler led a team of scientists who used high performance computing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory to calculate and visualize a 3-D model of an asteroid entering the Earth's atmosphere over one of the world's oceans. These efforts won them the Best Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase award at Supercomputing 2016. Reality is that what happens depends upon the mass, size, speed, angle of approach, and composition of the impacting object. Galen's group of scientists documented the hunch that since an asteroid strikes the water at a single point, it only effects the immediate region around the impact point, whereas to create a tsunami, you need something like an under water landslide which disturbs an entire water column from the ocean floor to the surface.