Mark Boslough

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Boslough at the American Geophysical Union Fall 2012 Conference

Mark Bruce Boslough (* before 1983 in Iowa ) is an American physicist.

Life

Boslough grew up in Broomfield (Colorado) and studied physics at Colorado State University with a bachelor's degree in 1977 and received his PhD in applied physics at the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech in 1984 under Thomas J. Ahrens (Dissertation: A sensitive optical pyrometer for shock-temperature measurements ). From 1983 until his retirement in 2017, he was a research fellow at Sandia National Laboratories . He was also an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico .

He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and has dealt with climate change deniers and scientific misconduct , among other things .

The asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) is named after him.

plant

He deals with the physics of impacts , that is, the impact of meteorites and asteroids on planets. Among other things, he dealt with the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts in Jupiter (as well as impacts on this planet in 2010 and 2012), the Tunguska event , 2008 TC3 in the Nubian Desert (the first asteroid observed before entering the earth's atmosphere) and visited was the first US scientist to discover the entry point of the Chelyabinsk meteor from 2013. He was there at the invitation of the television station Nova and, in addition to recordings, also brought parts of the meteorite with him. Because of its flat entry angle, there was no plume despite the explosion energy of half a megaton of TNT .

He is particularly known for simulating impacts on computers and presented them at many conferences, in television programs and in documentaries. In particular, he warned of the dangers of smaller bolides that explode in the atmosphere ( airburst ), which can lead to considerable local damage (heat generation, shock waves, gas jet flow) even with smaller objects than in the Tunguska event, where the object is probably round 40 m in diameter before it cascaded into the atmosphere. As early as the 1990s, he attributed to this the findings of a cover of the desert floor in the Libyan desert with molten glass . In 2011, he predicted that there was a high probability that the next destructive impact event would be an airburst, which was confirmed in Chelyabinsk in 2013.

Boslough is one of the most prominent critics of an impact hypothesis ( Richard Firestone , Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , 2006, 2007) in the younger Dryas period (about 12,900 years ago, fall of the Clovis culture , last ice advances of the Pleistocene).

At Sandia Labs, he worked on experimental shockwave research, tests to protect spacecraft against micrometeorites and shockwave-induced chemistry (initially he was in Bruno Morosin's department for shockwaves and physics of explosions). From the beginning of the 1990s, he began to deal increasingly with the numerical simulation of hyperspeed impacts. After that, he dealt with other activities at the laboratory, before turning to planetary and geoscientific impact research from around 2006. As early as 1993 he had his entry into the numerical simulation of impact events with Shoemaker-Levy 9, for which he used the supercomputer resources of the Sandia Lab (Intel Paragon parallel computer , the CTH code for shock wave calculations, otherwise at the Sandia Lab primarily for secret research work testable on a non-secret project). Post-doc Dave Crawford was involved and the aim was to make predictions for the observation of the impact on Jupiter (Tom Ahrens at Caltech and Kevin Zahnle / Mordecai-Mark MacLow did simulations independently). The impact occurred on the far side of Jupiter, but the Sandia team correctly predicted visibility from Earth (published in the Geophysical Research Letters on July 1, 1994 in good time before the impact), as did Ahrens in the same issue. In September 1994 he organized a Hypervelocity Impact Symposium (Comet Day) in Santa Fe, which Shoemaker was also present at, and a more detailed account was published in 1995. The diameter of the largest fragment was estimated from the simulation (which was still incomplete in resolution and underestimated the event overall) at around one kilometer (the asteroid before it broke up at 1.4 km). Boslough then turned to the effects of bolids exploding in the atmosphere on earth and found, even with simple simulations on his workstation, that the effects could be stronger than expected (explosion clouds (plumes) that rose hundreds of kilometers and could endanger even near-Earth satellites , downward-facing gas jets that could wreak more havoc than atomic bomb explosions of the same energy). At the end of 2005, he was invited to provide numerical simulations for a television documentary for the BBC and National Geographic about an airburst over the Libyan desert, whereby at Sandia Labs meanwhile both computers ( Red Storm ) and software (Dave Crawford) significant strides had been made, with much better resolution than the Jupiter crash. Boslough was invited to the expedition on the occasion of the centenary of the Tunguska event in 2008 and for the Nova documentation about a hypothesis of an impact in the Younger Dryas (end of the Clovis culture), where he took on the role of the skeptic, since in his own words the Originator of the hypothesis to have drawn far-reaching conclusions from his simulations and from an incorrect animation of the airburst explosion over the Libyan desert.

He was a co-author of the National Research Council's report on Defending Planet Earth, 2010.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Boslough, Are Climate Bullies Afraid to Bet Me? , Huffington Post Blog, December 6, 2017
  2. ↑ Leonard David: Forget Big Asteroids: It's the Smaller Rocks That Sneak In and Blow Up , space.com, October 5, 2010
  3. ↑ Subject of a television film Tutankhamun's Fireball , BBC Horizon 2006
  4. ↑ Boslough, M .; K. Nicoll; V. Holliday; Teaspoon daulton; D. Meltzer; N. Pinter; AC Scott; T. Surovell; Claeys, P.; J. Gill; F. Paquay; J. Marlon; P. Bartlein; C. Whitlock; D. Grayson, AJT: Arguments and Evidence Against a Younger Dryas Impact Event , in: Liviu Giosan u. a. (Eds.), Climates, Landscapes and Civilizations , Geophysical Monograph Series 198, American Geophysical Union 2012, pp. 13-26.
  5. ↑ MB Boslough, JA Ang, LC Chhabildas, WD Reinhart, CA Hall, BG Cour-Palais, EL Christiansen, JL Crews, Hypervelocity testing of advanced shielding concepts for spacecraft against impacts to 10 km / s. Int. J. Impact Eng., Vol. 14, 1993, pp. 95-106
  6. ↑ Mark B. Boslough, David A. Crawford, Allen C. Robinson, Timothy G. Trucano: Mass and penetration depth of Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragments from time-resolved photometry, Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 21, 1994, p. 1555– 1558, abstract
  7. ↑ Thomas J. Ahrens, Toshiko Takata, John O'Keefe, Glenn S. Orton: Radiative signatures from impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 on Jupiter, Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 21, 1994, pp. 1551-1554
  8. ↑ MB Boslough, DA Crawford, TG Trucano, AC Robinson, Numerical modeling of Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts as a framework for interpreting observations, Geophysical Research Letters 22, 1995, pp 1821-1824
  9. ↑ According to Boslough, the waves observed in Jupiter's atmosphere were also the result of a downwardly directed mass flow (jets).
  10. ↑ Memoirs of Mark Boslough in: James Asay u. a., Impactful Times: Memories of 60 Years of Shock Wave Research at Sandia National Laboratories, Springer 2017, p. 329ff. Here p. 342.
personal data
SURNAME Boslough, Mark
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boslough, Mark Bruce (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH before 1983
PLACE OF BIRTH Iowa