News You Can Bruise for 2004 April 19 (entry 0)

(3) Mon Apr 19 2004 19:25 How Dead Will You Be?: PBS used to have a morbid web page that would show you the blast radii of various types of nuclear weapon superimposed over a map of your hometown, provided by the aptly-named MapBlast. Now it's just a bunch of static HTML with descriptions of how you really don't want to be anywhere near a nuclear blast. The sample map image is the only thing thing that proves I wasn't hallucinating it all.

Kris figured they took down the interactive portion because of 9/11, which makes total sense. Previously, terrorists would only have had to obtain a nuclear device if they wanted to blow up a city. Now, they have to obtain a nuclear device and a map and compass! But what about other methods of horrible destruction, as yet out of human control? Are there convenient, non-terror-enabling online forms that show you how dead you will be? I decided to do some searching and find out.

• Earthquake: You can find out when you felt the tremors from past earthquakes, but that doesn't do you much good. However, see Asteroid Strike below. Update!: If you live in the SF Bay Area, Adam Parrish has a deal for you! Maps and everything!.
• Volcano Eruption: All I could find was this distance calculator to volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. If you don't mind doing a little web browsing, you can locate volcanoes in your area at this Smithsonian site or this USGS site, which is less comprehensive but has maps and other volcano freebies.
• Tsunami: Nothing I could find.
• Asteroid Strike: Here's what I'm talking about. Takes projectile characteristics and calculates all types of damage: crater ejecta, shock wave, thermal radiation, etc.

  Plus, since an asteroid strike causes an earthquake, you can work out a rough correspondence of impact criteria to Richter scale magnitude and simulate any kind of earthquake that way.

  My only complaint: With the right asteroid you can create an impact crater bigger than the earth. Indeed, you can specify an asteroid much bigger than the earth and it doesn't, as it should, treat the collision as a minor inconvenience to the asteroid.

• Tornado: Well, if you know the windspeed of a particular tornado, you can plug it in here and it will give you an index on the meaningless-except-to-tornado-geeks "Fujita Scale". But it will also give you wiseacre Midwestern comments, a decent proxy for "How dead will you be?" (Eg. "Too late to head for the cellar!")
• Flood: Well, this is pretty interesting. It's not a calculator per se, but a tutorial and script for simulating flooding in a GIS system. The reason I say it's interesting was I've been wondering how to do the same thing on a grand scale: see what the world would look like if the sea level were to rise or fall.
• Godzilla attack: Nothing. Not even a damage table you can roll on.

Well, I think that covers most of the SimCity disasters. Maybe the raw power of a nuclear explosion or an asteroid strike are what let you make a calculator that doesn't get hung up on the topography of the landscape or the size of a particular volcano.

Comments:

Posted by Zack at Mon Apr 19 2004 23:02

It says something about me, I'm sure, that I went and calculated the effects of throwing one-meter iron spheres at the earth at substantial fractions of the speed of light.
I suspect it's not taking relativistic effects into account; the damage done by a .9c cannonball is rather more modest than I would expect (even if I adjust the density by the Lorentz factor), and it doesn't register any objection to 10c.

Posted by Brendan at Mon Apr 19 2004 23:47

There has to be a Godzilla damage table somewhere in GURPS. If not, somebody ought to write it. There would be reductions based on the Cute Gamera Kid factor, and bonuses for whether his tail was, in fact, as long as this bus.

Posted by Adam P. at Tue Apr 20 2004 11:40

If you're just interested in the Bay Area, you can see whether or not your house would be destroyed by earthquakes along various faults using ABAG's earthquake shaking maps.