Water Ejecta from Asteroid Impact

Part of the work I have been undertaking recently has been developing an activity based on the Stage 5 Science syllabus to teach in high schools. The team I have been working in has based this around the scenario of a major impact from an asteroid in order to teach critical engineering skills such as dimensional analysis, the use of assumptions for highly complex real scenarios, practical problem solving and orthogonal thinking.

In order to contextualise the scenario better for the Year 9 class we were teaching, we thought it was best to create a visualisation of what this impact ejecta and resulting waves would look like.

Using equations from Steven Ward from Tsunami, Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics, Springer 2010, I coded up a reasonably simple simulation in MATLAB to demonstrate the transformation of energy into the fluid and the resulting fluid interactions. A degree of the geophysics resulting from these high energy impacts is still a little murky particularly to do with fluid on such a large scale and the proportion of energy transferring into the fluid for super-massive objects.

Simulation of 100m radius asteroid impact @ 21km/s:

The code to create this simulation is found here: MATLAB code for water ejecta.