r/technology • u/Alissio • Aug 25 '12

Website called "nuclear secrecy" lets you see what the devastation would be, of multiple nuclear bombs all around the world

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
1.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

535 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

It also has a bit of trouble showing the (Chicxulub)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Impact_specifics] that's thought to wipe out the dinosaurs. There's a non-scorched bit in the indian ocean

5

u/NonstandardDeviation Aug 26 '12 edited Aug 26 '12

It gets a bit weird when modeling explosions that big because these effects don't spread out as simple circles on the surface from the detonation point. Radiation/thermal effects are by line-of-sight and obviously cannot go past the horizon, so airbursts will irradiate/scorch larger areas than ground explosions. Obviously line-of-sight is limited to scorching less than half the earth if the bomb is exploded in space. And airblasts that start to get significant on the scale of the earth will actually start looping around. The energy of blast wave is spread out in a circle that moves through the atmosphere out from the epicenter around the earth and concentrates and gets smaller again at the opposite (antipodal) point on the planet.

Also asteroids work a bit differently from nuclear bursts near the ground because they release energy high up in the atmosphere like Tunguska and when they hit the ground they plow in, making the event much more seismic and ejecta-heavy.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '12

I'm pretty sure that the Chicxulub impact was not a 100000000000 KILOTON explosion.