Death by Asteroid: The Most Likely Ways for a Space Rock to Kill You
http://www.space.com/36532-killer-asteroids-most-likely-death-causes.html
If you live in fear of an asteroid strike, here's some detail to help flesh out your nightmares.
A killer space rock is most likely to get you via violent winds that fling you against something hard or powerful shock waves that rupture your
internal organs, according to a new study.
"This is the first study that looks at all seven impact effects generated by hazardous asteroids and estimates which are, in terms of human loss,
most severe," lead author Clemens Rumpf, a senior research assistant at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
Rumpf and his colleagues simulated 50 000 asteroid strikes around the globe using computer models. These artificial impacts involved space rocks
15 to 400 meters — the size range that hits Earth most frequently, the scientists said.
Then, the team estimated the percentage of deaths caused by each of the seven effects Rumpf referred to: shock waves, wind blasts, heat, flying
debris, cratering, seismic shaking and tsunamis.
Wind and shock waves were the most deadly, together accounting for more than 60 percent of all lives lost. (Though these two effects act in concert,
wind blasts were far more devastating than shock waves, the study found.) The sizzling heat of an impact was responsible for nearly 30 percent of
deaths, and tsunamis took most of the rest.
Asteroid impact effects and their immediate hazards for human populations - Rumpf - 2017 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL073191/full
Increase in average casualties per impactor size and the increasing contribution by each impact effect. First casualties due to wind blast and thermal radiation occurred at 18 m.
Impactors of 40 m produced the first pressure losses, and first surface impacts were recorded for impactors larger than 56 m. (b) Impact effect dominance distribution over
the asteroid size range up to 400 m.
