Does anyone know about the conditions and mechanisms that would be involved in the formation and duration of a nuclear winter, of the kind caused by a massive impact?

 

I am not interested in supposition, I am interested in things like:

 

- Relationship between impact force and period taken for dust to fill the atmosphere,

- Relationship between impact force and mass of dust/debris lifted,

- The mass of dust required to block out all light from the sun,

- Any information related to dissipation of the dust,

- Information on surface and atmospheric conditions, E.G. how fast does the surface temperature of the planet drop, does convection in the upper atmosphere cause turbulence and electrical storms, how far does UV penetrate, etc.

I don't know how much this will help you, but it is fun to play with:

 

The Nuclear Weapon Effects Calculator

 

http://www.nuclearwinter.com/

 

It is a wonderful stress reliever for those bad brain days.

The requested URL /nukeotron/ was not found on this server.

 

lol

 

Thanks anyway

Well, rats! I loved that game.

You'll be suprised by how little does the overall temp has to inc or dec in order to wreck havok on the ecology as we know it.

 

I dunno if you were ever introduced to the Snowball Earth Theory, but it's quite intriguing.

Here's a linky: http://ecosystems.wcp.muohio.edu/studentresearch/climatechange02/snowball/articles/Background.htm

 

Also, according to this, Nuclear Winter theory was 1st presented in the Journal Science in 1983 by Carl Sagan. So if you have the access to Science Online, then you should get that paper.

 

http://nyny.essortment.com/whatisnuclear_rioc.htm

 

Other than that, I couldn't find anything on the web that's comming from a pure scientific paper/perspective. So I'd hit the journal for details.

Science Online doesn't go back past Oct 1995. I know the paper title and the volume it was in, it's just (a) not there and (b) not actually that useful to someone asking the sort of questions that I asked.

 

RTFFP

http://keith.aa.washington.edu/papers/asteroidsIII.pdf

I did find this:

http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/TA.pdf

 

While I disagree with his many of his assumptions and interpretations, some of the information he is basing it on is very useful.

Great paper, thanks Syke