Killer Asteroid

It’s a sunny day, warm, but not so hot that you don’t want to go outside with your family. The sky is clear, no sign of rain anywhere. You are playing with your friends, texting and calling like any other day. No one is aware that NASA’s NEAT program has just found a new asteroid, a killer asteroid that is heading straight towards Earth at twice the speed of light. The astronomers have tracked its orbit and can not believe their own calculations. There is no more doubting it, the asteroid will impact the Earth. All that is left to do is figure out where and warn the people of the area.

This is no ordinary asteroid. It is a killer asteroid that is over 50 km in diameter. It will probably hit the Earth at a minimum of 185,000 kph and have a force equal to 100 million megatons. There is no way to imagine the impact force. We could explode all of the nuclear missiles on Earth and not be able to match explosive power of this asteroid’s impact.

Is there time to use our asteroid deflection protocols? No. Science has not agreed on a method of deflecting an asteroid yet. Besides that, it would take several days to assemble the delivery system and figure the trajectory solution to intercept the killer asteroid. We will try of course, but others will need to figure out where the asteroid will hit and try to evacuate the area as best possible. The evacuation plan will have to include an area at least 200 km in diameter just to avoid the immediate blast damage.

After carefully calculation and much argument, astronomers and other scientists believe that the killer asteroid will hit a very populated area, New York City. That means the evacuation of most of five states. New York and New Jersey will become part of the giant impact crater along with parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Rhode Island. There are only 2 days left to evacuate the area.

Panicked people flee as best they can, as far as they can. The killer asteroid hits! The impact immediately levels everything for 200 km, but the heat kills all life for another 100 km. The impact registers as an 8 on the Richter scale as far away as South Africa. The tsunami’s caused by the partial impact in the Atlantic Ocean reach England in a matter of hours and Europe shortly thereafter.
As the ejecta settles back to Earth it covers an area another 50 km in all directions, creating a rim that is 300 km in diameter. The dust in the air will block out the Sun for several months. The acid rain will kill most of the life it touches in the next few months. That is after the fires go out. A few volcanoes go active after the impact, only to compound the climate disturbances. Life as we know it is dead. All of it is over.

There will be nothing but chaos for years to come. Any central government will be useless. People will die by the millions from the initial impact and by the thousands each day after that. It will be months, if not a couple of years before people stop dying from starvation. With most of North America devastated, the world will have trouble feeding itself for decades to come.

This may seem like an overly dramatic view of what a killer asteroid could do to this planet, but it is very realistic. Every statement is based on scientific conclusions that have been made based on the damage imagined from craters like Chicxulub. If an asteroid that was 50 km in diameter can destroy the dinosaurs, just imagine what it can do to the heavily populated world that we live in today.

There are a couple of other good article about asteroid collision and an asteroid hitting Earth here on Universe Today. Here’s an article about a potentially hazardous asteroid 2002 nt7.

Reference:
NASA NEAT Program

Tagged as: asteroid impact, Chicxulub, killer asteroid, tsunami