TWO- AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATIONS OF ASTEROID OCEAN IMPACTS

We have performed a series of two-dimensional and three-dimensional simulations of asteroid impacts into an ocean using the SAGE code from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Science Applications International Corporation. The SAGE code is a compressible Eulerian hydrodynamics code using continuous adaptive mesh refinement for following discontinuities with a fine grid while treating the bulk of the simulation more coarsely. We have used realistic equations of state for the atmosphere, sea water, the oceanic crust, and the mantle. In two dimensions, we simulated asteroid impactors moving at 20 km/s vertically through an exponential atmosphere into a 5 km deep ocean. The impactors were composed of mantle material (3.32 g/cc) or iron (7.8 g/cc) with diameters from 250m to 10 km. In our three-dimensional runs we simulated asteroids of 1 km diameter composed of iron moving at 20 km/s at angles of 45 and 60 degrees from the vertical. All impacts, including the oblique ones, produce a large underwater cavities with nearly vertical walls followed by a collapse starting from the bottom and subsequent vertical jetting. Substantial amounts of water are vaporized and lofted high into the atmosphere. In the larger impacts, significant amounts of crustal and even mantle material are lofted as well. Tsunamis up to a kilometer in initial height are generated by the collapse of the vertical jet. These waves are initially complex in form, and interact strongly with shocks propagating through the water and the crust. The tsunami waves are followed out to 100 km from the point of impact. Their periods and wavelengths show them to be intermediate type waves, and not (in general) shallow-water waves. At great distances, the waves decay as the inverse of the distance from the impact point, ignoring sea-floor topography. For all impactors smaller than about 2 km diameter, the impacting body is highly fragmented and its remains lofted into the stratosphere with the water vapor and crustal material, hence very little trace of the impacting body should be found for most oceanic impacts. In the oblique impacts, the initial asymmetry of the transient crater and crown does not persist beyond a tsunami propagation length of 50 km.