Visualization and Analysis of Deep Water Asteroid Impacts

Abstract

As evident by the Earth’s history, severe asteroid impacts pose a significant threat to all species living on our planet. The severity of an impact is difficult to predict due to the vast amount of dependent parameters and thus the potential consequences on climate, plate tectonics and organisms are not yet fully understood. To improve our understanding of the threats imposed by asteroid impacts, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory conducted an ensemble simulation for varying impact scenarios into deep water oceans. The IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest 2018 is dedicated to the visual analysis of these asteroid impact simulations. In this paper, we apply a number of recent state-of-the-art visualization techniques to visually compare and analyze the varying impact scenarios. We discuss both automatic approaches applicable to an in-situ analysis, as well as interactive approaches for a detailed exploration.