What if a space elevator broke?

[buggs_moran]

The physics are simplistic and lots of factors are neglected but the site is still a little interesting if just for the animations. Perhaps we could use the last animation where the counterweight breaks off as a novel launch vehicle...

http://gassend.net/spaceelevator/breaks/index.html

[Reiko]

Seeing it wrap around the earth like that one can't help but wonder what the death toll on the surface would be.

[MKruer]

Its all depends but guesstimate I would stay maybe in the tens of thousands, and that is probably the high end. Even though the cable is coming down its not going to have a lot a sway as it wraps itself around the plant. I would be surprised if the crash zone was more then a kilometer wide.

[The Singing Badger]

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel [i]Red Mars[/i] has an interesting description of a space elevator collapsing onto Mars. You wouldn't want to be living anywhere near the equator...

[iniaes]

The cable would fall away from the direction of rotation, whilst the top would stay in geostationary orbit, so a lot of damae could be avoided by simply building it on the west coast, also, the seer mass of the falling cable would cause it to fall in a short area relative to the cables actual length.