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Scaling Implications of Terrestrial Impact of Meteors: Cratering, Ejecta and Cloud Formation, Induced Ground Motions

Description: 

Meteorite terrestrial impacts are established as the causes of large circular geological structures, major crustal deformations, large volumes of displaced rocks, extensive ejecta, and ultimately non-ideal debris cloud formation. Statistically, these are rare events, and the physical processes involved in terrestrial impacts and their subsequent induced effects, such as cratering, ejecta formation, airborne debris cloud formation, seismic ground motions, and eventual tsunami generation if impacts are shallow water seas, are very complex, and a physics-based approach is essential to differentiate between the different physical and mechanical processes and to address the key parameters that drive their behaviors and their implication on scaling laws. In the present study, we rely not only on HPC numerical simulations but also on the expertise acquired from of high energy near-surface explosions. Results presented in this paper indicate a slightly shallower or, depending on the geology, greater depth of analogue burst explosions is required to mimic scaling laws of crater diameter, displaced mass, ejecta blanket formation, and the characteristic times for crater-induced ground motions such as peak-particle velocities and accelerations. Crater debris depth and ejecta-travel distances are also numerically investigated because they play the key source parameters of cloud formation and global circulation. Numerical results show with confirmed confidence using existing observation data that the variations within the ejecta velocities are more consistent with half shallow buried yield-dependent high-explosive cratering events which is counter-intuitive to the common-wisdom assumptions. We supplement the results with meteorite impact movies on different crustal emplacements & geologies.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract DE-AC52- 07NA27344.

Session: Data-driven and Computational Characterization of Non-earthquake Seismoacoustic Sources [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/16/2025

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Souheil

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Poster Number: 73

Authors