Asteroids hit Earth with force of nuclear blasts

LONDON: Findings released for the first time by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization — which operates a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock, listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations — confirmed that between 2000 and 2013, 26 explosions on Earth's atmosphere were detected, ranging in energy from 1,600 kilotons — all caused by asteroid impacts.

To put it in perspective, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, exploded with an energy impact of 15 kilotons. While most of these asteroids exploded too high in the atmosphere to do any serious damage on the ground, the evidence is important in estimating the frequency of a potential "city-killer-size" asteroid. The Earth is continuously colliding with fragments of asteroids, the largest in recent times exploding over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 with an energy impact of 5-15 megatons.

More recently, scientists witnessed the 600-kiloton impact in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 and asteroid impacts greater than 20 kilotons occurred in South Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2009, in the Southern Ocean in 2004, and in the Mediterranean Sea in 2002.

The data shows "that asteroid impacts are not rare—but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought," said Ed Lu, co-founder and chief executive of the B612 Foundation. None of these 26 potentially-catastrophic asteroids were picked up or noticed in advance by any space- or Earth-based observatory. Experts used the data to point out how random perilous asteroids can be and what kind of threat they are to Earth.

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