The Deadly Effects of Touchdown Airbursts

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WI live in a crowded cosmic district. Asteroids swarm our solar system. The interstellar comets pass. Sometimes something completely weird. This week, a live flow formed on a volcano in Japan captured a fireball (probably a meteorite) unravel our atmosphere and lighting the sky over the island of Kyushu.

When the celestial bodies cross the journeys with the orbit and the gravity of the earth, its thing, brilliant light emissions can take place. But such interactions can also spell a disaster. Just ask dinosaurs. The asteroid modifying the evolution which led to their disappearance and opened the way to the rise of mammals and birds really left its mark on the earth. The huge chicxulub crater at the tip of the Yucatán peninsula commemorates the event.

But dramatic brushes with spaces of space that share our solar system can be fatal even when these things do not hit physically. Sometimes comets or meteors entering the earth’s atmosphere exploded before hitting the surface, sending tsunamis of heat and a high pressure explosion down with the strength of an atomic bomb. These so-called “Airdown Airbersts” can relax large housing expanses in a few seconds without leaving a gaping impact crater, and these events may have been more common in the history of our planet that we appreciated previously, according to an international team of researchers.

“Touché events can cause extreme damage through very high temperatures and pressures,” said James Kennett, professor emeritus at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and a team scientist, in a statement. “And yet, they do not necessarily form a crater, or they form ephemeral surface disturbances, but it is not the main classic craters that come from direct impacts.”

The publication of their conclusions in four recent articles, Kennett and its co-authors provide evidence for the abrasion of cosmic airports which, according to them, have occurred around the world and over the centuries.

In a Plos a Document, the researchers describe the marine sediments which contain “impact proxies” which they suggest resulting from a disintegration comet which exploded above our planet about 12800 years ago, sending a shock wave that rushed to the ground. These proxies, found in samples of sediment taken from four nuclei on the high seas in the groenland baffin bay, included high levels of metallic debris which could have come from comet dust and tiny spheres rich in iron and silica which could have been formed as intense heat was generated in an air.

Three other articles detailing the evidence of cosmic aerodynamic operations were all published earlier this year Airbersts and Cratation impactsA free access magazine published by Comet Research Group, a non-profit organization co-founded and produced by Kennett with three of its co-authors. A study poses a whirlwind of touchdown which occurred above Louisiana about 13,000 years ago and left traces of minerals which were melted by extreme heat, shocked quartz grains which could have been fractured or melted by an intense shock wave and a small depression which could have resulted from the event near the city of Perkins.

These evidence suggest that the Louisiana’s site could be linked to the fragmented comet exploding above the earth 12,800 years ago, arousing a major change in the climate history of the planet. Another article reports evidence born to similar sediments for an airy cosmic explosion that some scientists suggest a massive band of Siberian forest in 1908. And a third provides widened evidence suggesting that the average bronze city of Tall El-Hamman, near the Dead Sea, encountered a similar cosmic spell about 3 600 years ago.

Curiously, just before the publication of this last study, Kennett and his collaborators were forced to withdraw an article from Scientific relationships On the same subject, after four researchers, took accusations of methodological and analytical errors in the work of Tall el-Hammam. In the note of a publisher in the updated article, the authors write: “A small but vocal of scientists actively sought to suffocate the discussion on the great aeronautics of El-Hammam … In response, the authors updated, extended and republished the original article on Tall El-Hammam in this newspaper.”

While Skywatchers keeps your eyes on skies, the potential for cosmic air breaks and the destruction they could cause deserve more scientific attention, according to Kennett and its co -authors. “They are much more common, but also have a much more destructive potential than the more localized and classic asteroidal impacts of craters.” he said. “The destruction of Touché events can be much more widespread. And yet they have not been very well studied, so these should interest humanity.”

Image of lead: Romolo Tavani / Shutterstock

• Bob Grant

  Published on August 21, 2025

  Bob Grant is the editor -in -chief of Nautilus.