A Map of Every Nuke-Scale Asteroid Strike From the Last Decade

Though dinosaur-killing impacts are rare, large asteroids routinely hit the Earth. In the visualization above, you can see the location of 26 space rocks that slammed into our planet between 2000 and 2013, each releasing the energy of our most powerful nuclear weapons.
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Though dinosaur-killing impacts are rare, large asteroids routinely hit the Earth. In the visualization above, you can see the location of 26 space rocks that slammed into our planet between 2000 and 2013, each releasing energy equivalent to that of some of our most powerful nuclear weapons.

The video comes from the B612 Foundation, an organization that wants to build and launch a telescope that would spot civilization-ending asteroids to give humans a heads up in trying to deflect them. To figure out where asteroids were hitting our planet, B612 used data from a worldwide network of instruments that detect infrasound, low-frequency sound waves traveling through the atmosphere. Such measurements have been used since the 1950s to detect nuclear bomb explosions and can also pick up the tremendous burst of a bolide tearing through our atmosphere.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which operates the network, recently released the location of these asteroid strikes, which gives scientists another datapoint in understanding the frequency with which these events happen. In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that the Earth gets hit by enormous space rocks more often than we previously thought. The 26 strikes in the video above were each between 1 and 600 kilotons. For comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of 16 kilotons, and the U.S.'s most powerful nuclear weapon, the B83 bomb, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons. Of course, comparing asteroids to nuclear bombs is a bit misleading; asteroids generate a moving shockwave that can cause far more destruction than the rock itself.

Just to dial back your ever-increasing sense of anxiety here–asteroid impacts are almost always harmless. A Hiroshima-scale asteroid explosion happens in our atmosphere on average once a year and yet we're all still here. Moreover, asteroids can't aim themselves at populated centers. Most of the Earth's surface is water and even a large percentage of land is fairly uninhabited by humans. Though B612's Ed Lu mentions in the video that only "blind luck" is preventing a catastrophic city-size space rock from killing us, keep in mind that blind luck has actually been serving us fairly well so far.

Still, the well-publicized explosion over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia last year serves as a reminder that these events can be quite destructive. It would do us good to be on the lookout for them.