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Mark Boslough

Mark Boslough received his Ph.D. in applied physics, with studies in geophysics, from Caltech in 1983. He joined Sandia National Laboratories where he was an experimental and computational physicist. He departed Sandia in 2017 and joined Los Alamos National Laboratory. His impact research is focused on computational modeling of airbursts, their physical effects, and their contribution to the NEO risk. He participated in documentary field expeditions to airburst sites including the Libyan Desert of Egypt in 2006, Tunguska in 2008, and Chelyabinsk in 2013. He served on the asteroid mitigation panel for the National Research Council, and coauthored the report “Defending Planet Earth” that was delivered to Congress in 2010.

Research Interests

Mark Boslough pioneered the use of hydrocodes to model cosmic airbursts from near Earth objects for planetary defense risk assessment. In 1997, he published the first 3-dimensional simulation of a low-altitude airburst to model the Tunguska event. Boslough's hypothesis that the Libyan Desert Glass was formed by a Type 2 touchdown airburst was one of Discover Magazine's "Top 100 Science Stories of 2006" and was cited as the basis for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH). It also inspired the fringe belief that a Tunguska-sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a middle bronze age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea. Tall el-Hammam is one of the many archaeological ruins near the Dead Sea that various biblical explorers associate with Sodom and Gomorrah. Boslough's extensive analysis of archaeological evidence from Tall el-Hammam has shown that the sedimentary features are inconsistent with directional flow and destruction that would be generated by a low-altitude Type 2 touchdown airburst. Boslough's colleagues have shown that contaminants and other materials have been misidentified as impact proxies by biblical explorers. Nevertheless, Boslough and his colleagues argue that a hypothetical Taurid meteor stream might contain Tunguska-sized fragments that could increase the risk to our planet from an impact or airburst on in the years 2032 and 2036.

Email Mark at mbeb (at) unm (dot) edu

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