• Question: Can you get any natural disasters in space? (Earthquake/Hurricane/Tsunami)

    Asked by Hanjo to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 16 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by JOHM MELLON AND MADDIE CROPPER.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      @Hanjo well earthquakes require plate tectonics, so only the Earth has that in our solar system. Tsunami require an earthquake under the ocean to generate them, so that’s a “no” too. Hurricanes on the other hand occur in the atmospheres of the gas giants – in fact our hurricanes are nothing compared to the cyclones on jupiter and saturn!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      There are volcanos on Io! They’re pretty dramatic – but Io is pretty inhospitable already so I’m not sure that the volcanoes are the kicker for not going there. Hurricane-like storms exist on all of the gas giants, so we definitely have those, and Mars gets tornadoes of dust “dust devils” which sometimes go into planet-wide dust storms! As far as we know, not so much on the earthquake side, though the Sun does have sun-tsunamis! (Though again, that’s not the thing keeping us from going there!)

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