Mark Boslough
| Mark Boslough | |||||
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American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, December 2012, San Francisco.
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| Born | Iowa | ||||
| Nationality | American | ||||
| Fields |
Physics Geophysics |
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| Institutions |
Sandia National Laboratories University of New Mexico |
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| Alma mater |
California Institute of Technology Colorado State University |
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| Doctoral advisor | Thomas J. Ahrens | ||||
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Mark Boslough is a physicist. He is a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, an adjunct professor at University of New Mexico, and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.Asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) was named after him.
Boslough grew up in Broomfield, Colorado. He holds a B.S. in physics at Colorado State University, and an MS and PhD in applied physics at the California Institute of Technology.
An expert on planetary impacts and global catastrophes, Boslough’s work on airbursts challenged the conventional view of asteroid collision risk and is now widely accepted by the scientific community. He was the first scientist to suggest that the Libyan Desert Glass was formed by melting due to overhead heating from an airburst. His hypothesis was popularized by the documentaries “Tutunkhamun's Fireball” (BBC), (recipient of Discover Magazine's Top 100 Science Stories of 2006) and Ancient Asteroid National Geographic. which provided inspiration for the unorthodox and controversial notion that a large airburst over North America caused an abrupt climate change mass extinction. However, Boslough has been a leading critic of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, arguing among other things that the proponents have misinterpreted his airburst models. He appeared as a skeptic on the “Last Extinction“ Nova, (recipient of AAAS Kavli award for best science documentary of 2009).
In 2011, he presented a paper at the IAA Planetary Defense Conference in Bucharest, Romania, in which he stated, “It is virtually certain (probability > 99%) that the next destructive NEO event will be an airburst.” This prediction proved true less than two years later, on Feb. 15, 2013, when an airburst over Chelyabinsk, Russia injured more than 1000 people. Boslough was among the first western scientists to arrive in Chelyabinsk, where he did field research and accompanied a production crew filming Meteor Strike for NOVA. Most of the documentaries are focused on his impact and airburst modeling.
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