Open Veils · Answer
Est size of object that airburst ny to russia to texas
The NY-to-Russia-to-Texas ground track implies a shallow, hypersonic grazing trajectory spanning roughly 10,000–15,000 km of atmosphere. Objects producing city-to-regional-scale airbursts across that corridor would need to be in the 50–500 meter range depending on composition, entry angle, and velocity. Stony bolides fragment high and spread energy widely; iron or cometary objects penetrate deeper and concentrate blast. No single published model covers this exact corridor, but extrapolation from known events is well-documented.
Evidence
- The 1908 Tunguska event, now attributed by mainstream and alternative researchers alike to a stony asteroid estimated at 40–60 meters diameter (Space.com cites 40 meters / 130 feet), flattened roughly 2,150 square kilometers over Siberia in a single airburst at approximately 8–10 km altitude.
- The Chelyabinsk superbolide of February 15, 2013 — entering over the southern Urals — involved an object estimated at roughly 20 meters diameter and released energy equivalent to approximately 500 kilotonnes of TNT, injuring over 1,500 people and damaging buildings across a wide swath of Russia.
- For a continuous airburst corridor from New York to Russia to Texas — a ground track exceeding 12,000 km — the physics require either a very shallow entry angle (under 10°) or a fragmented swarm.
- At the 50-meter scale, regional devastation (Tunguska-equivalent); at 150–300 meters, continental-scale blast pressure and firestorm; at 400+ meters, hemispheric effects including impact winter.
- Randall Carlson, drawing on the Comet Research Group's work, places Tunguska-class impactors at the lower bound of civilization-threatening events, noting that swarms of such objects defined the Younger Dryas boundary catastrophe circa 10,800 BCE.