Impact Earth: Asteroids, Comets and Meteoroids, the Growing Threat - Softcover

Atkinson, Austen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753504014 ISBN 13: 9780753504017

Publisher: London Bridge, 2000

Synopsis

On 19 May 1996, Asteroid JA1 came within hours of devastating our planet with a release of energy five times more powerful than the world's entire nuclear arsenal. Superpowers watched helplessly as it approached. This text reveals the true risks involved and evidence of an international cover-up.

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Review

Over the past decade, the United States' nuclear-detection system and spy satellites have registered 250 atomic-bomb-sized detonations on and about our planet. Why were we not told? Well, we were, now and again, when someone felt like mentioning it, and when the world's media, starved of other news, could be bothered to run the story. Why were these explosions not newsworthy? Because they come not from the arsenals of hostile states, but from comets and asteroids impacting with the Earth's atmosphere.

We assume these events are rare. They are not. Their time-averaged death toll equals that of earthquakes and major floods. We assume these impacts rarely affect our lives. Author Austen Atkinson convincingly demonstrates that meteor and asteroid strikes have, and will again, skew human history in spectacular and terrible ways.

Impacts from objects no bigger than a baseball can, under the right conditions, wipe out cities. There is nothing we can do about them, as such objects are too small to be detected. On the other hand, bigger objects--the planet killers of films like Deep Impact and Armageddon--can be detected, and diverted, with existing technology but only if there is the global will to act accordingly. Impact Earth is a call to political arms as well as a work of popular science. It is deliberately sensationalist, and entirely serious. Atkinson, like many of the distinguished observers and scientists he quotes, is attempting to put cosmic debris strikes on the world political agenda. He is entitled to be loud. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk

Edition details

• Publisher: London Bridge
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0753504014
• ISBN 13: 9780753504017
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352