surviving a meteor strike

[Newby]

Does anyone know a good site where I could get information on this for a story I'm writing

[Rabelais]

Hmmmm well there are two things about your answer ansteyg. Firstly nothing touched the ground in the Tungunska incident which razed nearly 2150 sq. km of forest, but that most certainly would have killed you. And secondly if meteor never strike the ground. Where do all the meteorites and meteor craters come from? As to surviving a meteor I presume you mean a strike similar to those seen in films such as armageddon your best bet would be underground somewhere like NORAD in Colorado under Cheyenne Mountain.

[Rabelais]

Sigh.. As I said nothing touched the ground in Tunguska making it a meteor but it most certainly would have killed you. A meteor becomes a meteorite when it it survives it's transition through the atmosphere making a terestrial impact where if large enough forms a meteor crater. Allowing a meteor to be either just a meteor or both meteor and meteorite. All of this symantic juggling help the original questioner not one iota, but just made us look like a pair of backward pedants, thanks a lot.

[New Forester]

For your story, first of all make Ansteyg and Rabelais happy by doing a search-and-replace on "meteor", changing it to "meteorite" throughout... Then, if your meteorite is big enough to do serious damage, your hero needs to be a very good distance away from it. Underground nearby will not do unless it's a little one -- a big crater might be half a mile deep, and there will be enormous shocks through both the ground and air, and flash-ignition of vegetation and buildings over a wide area. Your best bet would be to be somewhere else altogether -- and not too near the sea either, as the shocks are likely to make or trigger large tsunami over a lot of the world. Another thought to consider... Some people are suggesting developing rockets and hydrogen bombs all ready to repel any dangerous asteroids. Jolly fine idea -- but we might have to wait hundreds or even thousands of years for a real threat to appear. Whom could we trust with such weaponry for that long? (I know -- Dubya!) I think this "cure" is probably more far more risky than any likely meteorite strike. Am I cynical to think it's really to give all the unemployed nuclear and rocket engineers something to do after the Cold War?

[Newby]

I stand corrected (or do I?). Anyway, every time the "you have mail" thingy comes up I run to Answerbank like a puppy to an open butcher's door and , as Bono says,I still haven't found what I'm looking for...which is a site on the net that might give me ideas about possible climactic changes, population survival percentages etc and whether the damn thing is a meteor or a meteorite.