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Irish Examiner
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
How do some blockbuster disaster movies stack up against real science?
From fiery asteroids to rogue planets, humanity's fascination with its own demise has fuelled countless blockbuster films. End-of-the-world movies captivate us with their spectacle and suspense, but how do they stack up against real science? Let's explore some iconic apocalypse films and rate which ones get close to plausible science and which ones veer into pure fantasy. The scientifically plausible, kind of… Deep Impact (1998) Deep Impact starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and Morgan Freeman Plot: A comet is on a collision course with Earth, threatening mass extinction. Science Check: This one gets a lot right. Comets (icy, rocky bodies from the outer solar system) could indeed strike Earth, as they have in the past (think of the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — although this is widely believed to have been caused by an asteroid not a comet). The film's depiction of a global effort to deflect the comet with nuclear weapons aligns with real-world concepts like NASA's planetary defence strategies, including the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully altered an asteroid's orbit in 2022. Where it stretches plausibility is in the timeline, detecting a comet just months before impact is unlikely with today's tech, which can spot near-Earth objects years in advance. Still, the tsunami-causing aftermath of a smaller fragment hitting the Atlantic? That's a chillingly realistic touch. Accuracy Rating: 7/10. Nails comet impacts and deflection but stretches the detection timeline. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) The Day After Tomorrow starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Emmy Rossum, and Ian Holm Plot: Climate change triggers a sudden ice age, with superstorms and flash-freezing chaos. Science Check: This film takes a kernel of truth and runs wild with it. The idea of a disrupted Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key ocean current that regulates global climate, has basis in science. Studies suggest that melting polar ice from climate warming have weakened this system, and under high emissions scenarios it could collapse, which would cool Europe and the planet overall; however, scientists aren't sure about the timing this could happen — it's a hot (or cold) topic. But the movie's hyper-accelerated timeline (days instead of decades) and dramatic effects, like tornadoes shredding Los Angeles or New York freezing solid in hours, are pure Hollywood. Real climate shifts are gradual, not instant, and liquid nitrogen-style freezing of humans? Thermodynamically absurd. Accuracy Rating: 4/10. AMOC disruption is real, but the rest is cinematic craic. Interstellar (2014) Anne Hathaway as Amelia in Interstellar. Picture: Warner Bros/Paramount/Melinda Sue Gordon Plot: Earth becomes uninhabitable due to crop failures and dust storms, prompting a search for a new home via a wormhole. Science Check: Interstellar earns points for ambition. The film consulted physicist Kip Thorne, ensuring its wormhole and black hole visuals (like Gargantua's accretion disk) were grounded in relativity theory. Crop blight wiping out food supplies is a plausible threat, fungal pathogens and climate change do endanger global agriculture. However, the idea of Earth becoming a dust-choked wasteland in mere decades is exaggerated; such a collapse would likely take centuries. The wormhole? Theoretically possible, but we've no evidence they exist or could be navigated. Accuracy Rating: 7/10. Blight and dust are credible, but the speed and wormhole travel are speculative. The scientifically absurd Armageddon (1998) Armageddon with Bruce Willis Plot: A Texas-sized asteroid threatens Earth, and oil drillers are sent to nuke it from the inside. Science Check: Armageddon is a rollercoaster of nonsense. An asteroid that big (1,000 km wide) would obliterate Earth on impact, no drilling required. Splitting it with a nuke wouldn't work either; you'd need energy far exceeding all human-made explosives combined, and the fragments would still rain down catastrophically. Plus, training drillers to be astronauts in days? NASA would sooner train astronauts to drill. It's a thrilling ride, but it's about as scientific as a cartoon. Accuracy Rating: 1/10. Gets the asteroid threat vaguely right but flunks physics and logistics. 2012 (2009) 2012 starring John Cusack, Thandiwe Newton, Danny Glover, and Woody Harrelson Plot: Neutrinos from a solar flare heat Earth's core, causing continents to shift and mega-tsunamis to ensue. Science Check: This one's a doomsday fever dream. Neutrinos, near-massless particles that pass through matter, are incapable of heating Earth's core. Science says no, but the film says 'yes, and here's tsunamis'. The idea of 'solar flares' triggering pole shifts or crust displacement is geological gibberish, plate tectonics don't work that way, and shifts take millions of years, not hours. The arks saving humanity are a nice touch, but the science here is a Mayan prophecy-level stretch. Accuracy Rating: 0/10 —Pure fantasy with zero scientific grounding. The Core (2003) The Core: In a last-ditch effort to restart the planet's failing magnetic field, scientists and astronauts must set off a nuclear device at the center of the Earth. 2003 film starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and Stanley Tucci Plot: Earth's core mysteriously stops spinning, so a team drills down to detonate nukes and restart it. Science Check: Where to begin? The core stopping would take an incomprehensible force (far beyond anything natural) and would disrupt Earth's magnetic field gradually, not instantly. Drilling to the core is impossible with current tech; the deepest hole ever (Kola Superdeep Borehole) reached just 12 kilometres, versus the 2,900 kilometres to the outer core. And nukes restarting it? Angular momentum doesn't work like a car engine. This film's a wild sci-fi romp, not a science lesson. Although there is a factually correct documentary by the same name... and I know a lecturer who accidentally played the wrong core movie to their university class. They shall remain anonymous. Accuracy Rating: 0/10. A wild sci-fi ride with no scientific legs. Why we love the apocalypse anyway Whether they nail the science or fling it out the window, end-of-the-world films tap into our primal fears and hopes. Films such as Deep Impact and Interstellar remind us of real threats, asteroids, climate change, resource depletion, while offering heroic solutions. Meanwhile, Armageddon and 2012 lean into absurdity, prioritising explosions over equations. Scientifically accurate or not, they all ask: How would we face the end? And that's a question worth pondering, even if the neutrinos stay harmless and the core keeps spinning. So, next time you're watching an apocalyptic blockbuster, enjoy the ride and just don't bet on it being a documentary.
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Earth Impactors Remain A Catastrophic Threat, Says Leading Geologist
Illustration of Pteranodon sp. flying reptiles watching a massive asteroid approaching Earth's ... More surface. A similar impact is believed to have led to the death of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The impact would have thrown trillions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, cooling the Earth's climate significantly, which may have been responsible for the mass extinction. A layer of iridium-rich rock, known as the K-pg boundary, is thought to be the remnants of the impact debris. Earth impactors of the sort that brought down the dinosaurs are now usually looked upon as relics of the distant past. Indeed, most of Earth's asteroidal incursions took place hundreds of millions of years earlier than the Chicxulub impactor that hit Earth some 66 million years ago. But each year astronomers detect new asteroids, and their impact threat remains real. The United Nations has even declared 2029 for as the 'International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defense.' Even if a small 50-meter diameter object hits a large city, it could easily kill a million people, Christian Koeberl, a planetary scientist at the University of Vienna, tells me at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2025 in Austria. We now know of 40,000 Earth crossing or near-Earth asteroids, he says. In a decade's time, we may have detected as many as 100,000 near-Earth asteroids, says Koeberl. Yet on Earth there are only 200 currently known impact craters and only three are known to be truly ancient between 2.2 to 2.3 billion years old. And less than half of the 200 have precisely determined ages. That's not very many, but Earth is an active geological body, and so things change on the surface over time, says Koeberl. On Earth, there's constant weathering, erosion, volcanism as well as plate tectonics, the means by which our planet recycles its crust. Even though Galileo first identified what we now know are impact craters on the moon in 1610, geologists didn't definitively link those lunar craters to impacts until rock samples from Apollo 11 were analyzed in Earth laboratories, says Koeberl. But in the 1980s, when evidence for the dinosaur-killing impactor was discovered, geologists realized that all you need is a very small asteroidal object to make a crater that is least 20 times larger than the impacting body, says Koeberl. How important has satellite remote sensing been in identifying Earth impact craters? It used to be somewhat useful, but it has run its course, because by now, we have identified all the circular structures that are obvious of impact origin, says Koeberl. Even so, Koeberl notes that he's constantly bombarded by amateur Google Earth impact sleuths who think they have found a new impact crater. But as Koeberl explains nearly all such photos have been formed by wholly Earth-based geological processes. Impacts are the highest energetic geological process that we know, says Koeberl. Each event per area, per affected rock is somewhere between a hundred to a few thousand times more energetic than the largest volcanic eruption possible, he says. In fact, they are so energetic that they cause changes in the affected rocks' mineral structure. I could name a dozen other geological processes that form circular crater-like features on Earth's surface, says Koeberl. This is what brings us to the very important point of shock metamorphism, which is how you identify an impact crater, he says. Koeberl takes out his laptop and shows me a magnified image of a quartz crystal rock that has the telltale signatures of impact shock. No normal quartz crystal will look like this, says Koeberl. The lines that go through here are what we call shock lamellae, and they only form from an impact and no other geological process, he says. The paucity of ancient craters also correlates with major episodes of extensive 'Snowball Earth' glaciation phases, with its related subglacial erosion some 650 to 720 million years ago, Koeberl and colleagues note in a 2024 paper in the journal Precambrian Research. It's thought to have removed kilometers of material from the continents, enough to erase most existing impact craters except for the large ones, they write. Despite their potential for calamity, serendipitously, a few impacts have inadvertently revealed precious metals buried beneath Earth's surface. Located in the center of the Witwatersrand gold fields in present day South Africa, the Vredefort impact event formed the largest impact structure that remains at least partly preserved, the authors note. Some two billion years ago, the impact uplifted a massive gold cache that since the 1880s has generated about a third of the total gold ever extracted from our planet, they write. Trouble is, most of us fail to realize that we live in a dynamic solar system with asteroidal and cometary leftovers from its formation that potentially threaten life here in untold ways. Past impact craters on the surface of our planet serve as a reminder that we are constantly bombarded from space, often with devastating consequences, says Koeberl. Such events happened in the past and will happen in the future, he says.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
UK's Geological Past Shaken by Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Find
In a recent groundbreaking discovery, scientists have identified evidence of a meteorite impact in north-west Scotland that dates back 1 billion years. The space rock is considered the oldest known meteorite strike in the United Kingdom and one of the oldest recorded on Earth. These new findings have prompted many researchers to revise parts of the geological history of the British Isles. The evidence was uncovered by geologists studying rocks from the Stac Fada Member of the Stoer Group, located in the remote parts of the Highlands. Evidence was found by studying rocks in the Highlands (Tony Prave) These rocks were long suspected to be linked to an ancient impact, but until now, solid confirmation had been missing. Unmistakable signs of a catastrophic impact Professor Kirkland, the lead author from Curtin's Frontier Institute for Geoscience Solutions within the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said 'When a meteorite hits, it partially resets the atomic clocks inside the zircon crystals and these 'broken timepieces' are often unable to be dated but we developed a model to reconstruct when the disturbance occurred, confirming the impact at 990 million years ago.' Professor Chris Kirkland dated the impact to 990 million years ago (Curtin University) Before the discovery, it was previously believed that the impact occurred 1.2 billion years ago. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement But the new research used tiny zircon crystals as geological time capsules to get a better understanding of when the impact occurred, which they have now placed at 990 million years ago. Scotland's geological timeline revised The impact crater itself has not yet been found, however, many scientists believe it may lie under the Minch, the strait that separates mainland Scotland from the Outer Hebrides. Estimates suggest the crater could be between 15 and 20 kilometres in diameter. Given the age of the rocks and the tectonic changes that have occurred since the impact, locating the original site might prove to be challenging. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement Despite the missing crater, the fallout from the strike was preserved in the Stac Fada deposits. Dr Kirkland stated 'While the impact crater itself has yet to be found, this study has collected further clues that could finally reveal its location. "Understanding when meteorite impacts occurred helps us explore their potential influence on Earth's environment and the expansion of life beyond the oceans,' he went on to say. 'The revised dating suggests these life forms in Scotland appeared at a similar time to a meteorite impact. "This raises fascinating questions about whether large impacts may have influenced environmental conditions in ways that affected early ecosystems." ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement The 1 billion-year-old meteorite strike significantly predates the more famous Chicxulub impact that killed the dinosaurs, which itself was around 600 million years ago. While not as globally catastrophic, the Scottish event is significant in helping scientists understand how Earth evolved in its early years, making it a vital piece of research to help us fully understand our planet's history.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dinosaurs were probably not doomed for extinction and could exist today — if it weren't for the giant asteroid
There might still be dinosaurs living on Earth today — if not for the giant asteroid. It's a long-debated issue, but now researchers say the idea Dinosaurs were in decline before the Chicxulub asteroid struck 66 million years ago could be due to fossil collection practices. Not from an actual decline in population before the extinction event. Previous research had found climate change could be the cause of the initial decline. 'We analyzed the fossil record and found that the quality of the record of four groups of dinosaur (clades) gets worse during the final six million years prior to the asteroid. The probability of finding dinosaur fossils decreases, while the likelihood of dinosaurs having lived in these areas at the time is stable,' said Dr. Chris Dean, a professor at University College London, said in a statement. 'This shows we can't take the fossil record at face value.' Dean was the lead author of the research, which was published earlier this month in the journal Current Biology. To reach these conclusions, the authors examined the historical timeline of more than 8,000 fossils in the 18 million years leading up to the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period. Signs of decline in the years leading up to the impact were due to fossils being less likely to be discovered, they asserted. That's primarily because there are fewer locations with exposed and accessible rock from that time. They focused on four groups that included the armored Ankylosaurus, the popular Triceratops, the duckbilled Edmontosaurus and the king, Tyrannosaurus Rex. Using a statistical method to assess how likely a species is to inhabit a particular area, they estimated how much of North America the dinosaurs likely occupied at four different times in those 18 million years. The researchers said that the proportion of land the dinosaur groups likely occupied remained constant overall. That suggests their potential habitat area remained stable and the risk of extinction stayed low. 'Half the fossils we have from this time were found in North America. Our findings hint that, in this region at least, dinosaurs may have been doing better than previously suggested in the lead-up to the asteroid impact, potentially with a higher diversity of species than we see in the raw rock record,' Dean explained. Researchers also estimated the likelihood of the four dinosaur types being detected in each area, basing that on how much land is accessible to researchers, how much rock is exposed and how many times the researchers had attempted to find fossils from that area. The likelihood of detection declined over the years they examined. Triceratops and its group of related dinosaurs were more likely to be detected due to them favoring green plains when the habitat became the main type of environment being maintained. 'In this study, we show that this apparent decline is more likely a result of a reduced sampling window, caused by geological changes in these terminal Mesozoic fossil-bearing layers - driven by processes such as tectonics, mountain uplift, and sea-level retreat — rather than genuine fluctuations in biodiversity,' co-author Dr. Alessandro Chiarenza added. 'Dinosaurs were probably not inevitably doomed to extinction at the end of the Mesozoic. If it weren't for that asteroid, they might still share this planet with mammals, lizards, and their surviving descendants: birds,' he said.
The Independent
02-05-2025
- Science
- The Independent
Dinosaurs were probably not doomed for extinction and could exist today — if it weren't for the giant asteroid
There might still be dinosaurs living on Earth today — if not for the giant asteroid. It's a long-debated issue, but now researchers say the idea Dinosaurs were in decline before the Chicxulub asteroid struck 66 million years ago could be due to fossil collection practices. Not from an actual decline in population before the extinction event. Previous research had found climate change could be the cause of the initial decline. 'We analyzed the fossil record and found that the quality of the record of four groups of dinosaur (clades) gets worse during the final six million years prior to the asteroid. The probability of finding dinosaur fossils decreases, while the likelihood of dinosaurs having lived in these areas at the time is stable,' said Dr. Chris Dean, a professor at University College London, said in a statement. 'This shows we can't take the fossil record at face value.' Dean was the lead author of the research, which was published earlier this month in the journal Current Biology. To reach these conclusions, the authors examined the historical timeline of more than 8,000 fossils in the 18 million years leading up to the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period. Signs of decline in the years leading up to the impact were due to fossils being less likely to be discovered, they asserted. That's primarily because there are fewer locations with exposed and accessible rock from that time. They focused on four groups that included the armored Ankylosaurus, the popular Triceratops, the duckbilled Edmontosaurus and the king, Tyrannosaurus Rex. Using a statistical method to assess how likely a species is to inhabit a particular area, they estimated how much of North America the dinosaurs likely occupied at four different times in those 18 million years. The researchers said that the proportion of land the dinosaur groups likely occupied remained constant overall. That suggests their potential habitat area remained stable and the risk of extinction stayed low. 'Half the fossils we have from this time were found in North America. Our findings hint that, in this region at least, dinosaurs may have been doing better than previously suggested in the lead-up to the asteroid impact, potentially with a higher diversity of species than we see in the raw rock record,' Dean explained. Researchers also estimated the likelihood of the four dinosaur types being detected in each area, basing that on how much land is accessible to researchers, how much rock is exposed and how many times the researchers had attempted to find fossils from that area. The likelihood of detection declined over the years they examined. Triceratops and its group of related dinosaurs were more likely to be detected due to them favoring green plains when the habitat became the main type of environment being maintained. 'In this study, we show that this apparent decline is more likely a result of a reduced sampling window, caused by geological changes in these terminal Mesozoic fossil-bearing layers - driven by processes such as tectonics, mountain uplift, and sea-level retreat — rather than genuine fluctuations in biodiversity,' co-author Dr. Alessandro Chiarenza added. 'Dinosaurs were probably not inevitably doomed to extinction at the end of the Mesozoic. If it weren't for that asteroid, they might still share this planet with mammals, lizards, and their surviving descendants: birds,' he said.
