<p>Hollywood movies may have wrongly depicted massive waves wiping out coastal cities when an asteroid crashes into the ocean, a new study has found.<br /><br />New simulations show that real asteroids do not make a splash because the crash releases most of its energy hurling water up into the atmosphere, and very little on making waves.<br /><br />"The folklore has been that tsunamis from impactors will be the danger," said Galen Gisler from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US.<br /><br />Researchers ran 3D simulations that modelled wave formation from falling rocks of various sizes and found that the waves formed by smaller asteroids resemble landslide tsunamis on Earth.<br /><br />"The splash wave can be very dangerous - out to tens of kilometres - but beyond that, they fall away more sharply," Gisler said.<br /><br />He found that most of the energy (80 per cent) from an impact is spent vaporising water and forming a crater, 'Space.com' reported.<br /><br />The remaining 20 per cent throws most of the liquid water up into the atmosphere, where it has the potential to affect weather patterns, said Gisler.<br /><br />He estimated that only a tenth of one per cent of the kinetic energy from an impact is spent forming waves. Those waves can still be massive, but they break up quickly.<br /><br />"It is very ineffective at actually producing a wave. The waves do not propagate very well," Gisler added. <br /></p>
<p>Hollywood movies may have wrongly depicted massive waves wiping out coastal cities when an asteroid crashes into the ocean, a new study has found.<br /><br />New simulations show that real asteroids do not make a splash because the crash releases most of its energy hurling water up into the atmosphere, and very little on making waves.<br /><br />"The folklore has been that tsunamis from impactors will be the danger," said Galen Gisler from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US.<br /><br />Researchers ran 3D simulations that modelled wave formation from falling rocks of various sizes and found that the waves formed by smaller asteroids resemble landslide tsunamis on Earth.<br /><br />"The splash wave can be very dangerous - out to tens of kilometres - but beyond that, they fall away more sharply," Gisler said.<br /><br />He found that most of the energy (80 per cent) from an impact is spent vaporising water and forming a crater, 'Space.com' reported.<br /><br />The remaining 20 per cent throws most of the liquid water up into the atmosphere, where it has the potential to affect weather patterns, said Gisler.<br /><br />He estimated that only a tenth of one per cent of the kinetic energy from an impact is spent forming waves. Those waves can still be massive, but they break up quickly.<br /><br />"It is very ineffective at actually producing a wave. The waves do not propagate very well," Gisler added. <br /></p>