TO ABSOLUTELY NO ONE'S SURPRISE, MOVIES ARE COMPLETE BULLSHIT, AND SCIENCE EXPLAINS WHY.

PIC(S) INFO: Mega spotlight on assorted illustrations of NEO impact collisions with planet Earth. Various artists.

OVERVIEW: "When an asteroid hits the middle of the ocean in Hollywood movies, it creates devastating waves that wipe out coastal cities. But new simulations reveal that real asteroids don't make such a splash. That's because the crash releases most of its energy hurling water up into the atmosphere, and very little on making waves.

"The folklore has been that tsunamis from impactors will be the danger," Galen Gisler, who studies the physics of geological processes at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference last month in The Woodlands, Texas. (Gisler also presented the work at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in December 2016.) He ran 3D simulations that modeled wave formation from falling rocks of various sizes, and found that the waves formed by smaller asteroids resemble landslide tsunamis on Earth.

-- SPACE.COM, "New Asteroid Study Suggests Hollywood Is Wrong About Ocean Impacts," by Nola Taylor Redd, published April 17, 2017