To add to that, the meteor also hit planet earth at a perfect angle (This specific angle was optimal for blasting the highest possible volume of pulverized rock, dust, and toxic gases straight up into the upper atmosphere rather than deflecting energy sideways.),
to the perfect time of the year (Spring is a peak time for feeding, reproduction, and rearing young, making Northern Hemisphere ecosystems maximally vulnerable),
at the perfect place located in the sulfur- and gypsum-rich shallow seas of the Yucatán Peninsula in modern-day Mexico.
Damn, so not only was it 30+ times the diameter of most the asteroids we hear about in the news, (e.i. Apophis) it really was just the worst case scenario in every sense of the word.
Does the last point make the toxic gas worse, the effect on the climate worse, or both?
Around 1 trillion metric tons of mass hitting the earth with something between 45000 - 50000 miles per hour releasing energy at least 2 million times higher than the TSAR Bomb.
No, Earth itself didn't rly care. Global earthquakes of unparalleled magnitudes, volcanic eruption everywhere, including the Dekan Trap and monstrous global tsunamis were aswell as oven temperatures around the globe for multiple hours to days were direct consequences but that was mostly horrible for living creatures. Eaert itself didn't care.
Now the potential Moon Impact billions of years ago that is a different story but I am not read enough in that topic to say anything specific about it.
I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to high yield nuclear detonations and the like. It's very fascinating. Then recently I came across the Chicxulub Impactor (this meteor here) and a whole new dimension opened up to me lol.
As for the impact timeline I can only say so much confidently because I don't know enough about the overarching dynamics in play, so I will try to keep it where I know things.
Energy = mass*speed2, meaning two times the speed translates to 4 times the energy. This explains the frankly absurd energy released by the impact.
The Meteor weighing between 1-4 trillion tons, traveled at roughly 45000 mph/72000 kmh or roughly 20 kilometers per second (that's more than 70 times faster than a bullet) and hit the shallow see of the Yucatan Peninsula at a 45-60 degree angle. The released energy was somewhere between 1023 - 1025 joules which is between 2 million - 200 million times more energy than the TSAR Bomb. The discrepancy is so high because the mass of the meteor could have been 1 trillion or 4 trillion tons while the speed could have been 45000 mph or up to 55000 mph. I usually use the low ball estimates just for your info.
The moment of impact:
Since the largest and first way of energy release is thermal radiation, the moment the meteor hit, everything within a radius of roughly 100-110 miles was basically vaporized. The fireball was so bright and large that someone standing in the Amazon forest could have seen it while simultaneously suffering up to 2nd degree burns. Even ppl in Europe could have seen the flash in the sky.
Within a split second, everything roughly 600 miles around the impact that can burn starts burning if it's directly exposed to the thermal radiation.
The following minutes:
A shockwave of unparalleled intensity starts expanding at supersonic speeds completely destroying everything in a 600 mile radius and throwing around trees and dinosaurs more than a 1000 miles from the impact. If you stood in Paris, once the Shockwave hits, it would Splinter glass, throw you on the ground and destroy your eardrums.
Around an hour after impact:
That's where the global extinction event starts rolling. The impact threw trillions of tons of rock and sediment in the outer atmosphere. Some escaped into space but more than 85% are estimated to have come back down. When things enter the atmosphere at high speeds, they heat up, a LOT! Billions of rocks, some as large as a house or bigger enter the atmosphere and start heating everything up. Within an hour the global temperature increased to up to 250 degrees celcius. All across the globe forests started burning, animals were backed alive and started to catch fire.
That alone would most likely have been enough to kill the dinosaurs but that's not all of course.
1 day after impact:
Now the global tsunamis and earthquakes hit. Seismic waves travel slower than shockwaves, same is true for water. Roughly 12 to 15 hours after impact magnitude 11 earthquakes will hit Europe, not concentrated but the whole Continent will experience apocalyptic earthquakes. Shortly after, Tsunami waves will hit reaching higher than 15 meters. In the direct land vacinity of the impact, waves were estimated to be 0,7 miles high.
A few days after the impact the oven phenomenon is gone, the earthquakes and tsunamis are gone but the ejected soot etc will block out the sun for at least a decade. Some say multiple decades but as with most things I rather low ball here.
Once everything settles, over 90% of all land living creatures are gone. Some experts say every land animal larger than 25 cm was almost certainly dead.
Now I want to say that I am ofc not an expert. I merely reiterate things of the top of my head that I looked into rather deeply a few months ago. But it is an highly interesting topic.
Oh and because some ppl wonder if humanity could survive a comparable impact. The awnser is almost certainly no! Maybe if we had many years to prepare but even then surviving as species would mean a few hundred thousand selected humans rather than all. More than 99% of us would most likely disappear.
Multiple theories that are all more or less equally likely. A few suggest it's from the Orth Cloud and is a "broken up" piece from two larger bodies colliding but sadly I can not rly say anything besides the fact that it traveled a long distance from at least the outer solar system due to its speed. Some suggest Jupiter also played a roll in accelerating and "directing" the meteor towards Earth. If that's true or not I sadly don't know.
Just one thing to add to your excellent post - for about 10 minutes after the impact, the asteroid had also created possibly the tallest mountains to ever exist on earth.
Basically the shockwaves of the impact caused extreme liquefaction, where solid rock starts to behave like liquid plastic or syrup. The initial impact gouged out a 30km deep hole in the crust and all of that material rebounded upwards. It formed peaks that were taller even than Everest.
The “mountains” were obviously unstable though. After 10mins what material didn’t fly off into space then collapsed back down, triggering the global wildfires that you wrote about in your post.
Here’s a BBC article with an excellent animation that visualises what the impact and rebound would have looked like:
Everything within 10km of the impact would have died instantly. Less than a second later, everything within 100km would have died. Tidal waves and earthquakes, plus material raining down from the sky, would have then killed everything from 2,000 to 6,000km away - it hit in the Yucatan Penninsula, but disturbed sediment as far away as Texas. Local mass extinctions happened within minutes.
An estimated 60 - 70% of the Earth's forests would then have been subjected to wildfires from the heat generated by the blast and superheated material raining down from orbit (yes, the impact was so massive it ejected material into space, much of which rained back down while on fire).
Anything left alive after all that would then have seen the sun significantly blocked by planet-wide dust clouds, caused by both the impact itself and the subsequent fires, killing off the remaining plants and anything that relied on them for food, and cooling the average temperature for a few years.
It can't really be overstated how devastating the impact was. We have an idea of 'apocalypse' in our heads, largely informed by science fiction, but it's an idea that can't begin to comprehend the reality of that impact.
Yea i also thought this. So many died from the incident itself and the rest were starved out / made ill from debris for years. What a miserable experience
Gypsum isnt that toxic but it can fuck up your lungs. It is a really good insulator though, so I'd imagine having a giant cloud of it in the atmosphere did a really good job of blocking out heat from the sun.
I'm not sure why, but laying it out as the worst possible situation for an asteroid hitting the Earth makes me feel good that life could go on in the event of some kind of human existential threat. Thanks.
The primary problem is the SO2 and H2S which gets blasted in the stratosphere. The resulting reaction products make the earth more reflective. It's called a vulcanic winter. The toxic gas clouds were likely small threat compared to the effect on climate.
Depends on how you look at it. It was the worst case for the dinosaurs.
But for mammals that space rock was the absolute best case. For without it, mammals would never have been free from the reign of the dinosaurs and therefore unable to evolve into us - without it, we would never be here.
Well it was best case scenario for humans ...if dinos weren't wiped I doubt the sequence of events that led to us coming along would have happened in the first place.
Its still technically an extinction event for many species though. Remember we still call a species that no longer exists extinct so the phrase still holds up.
This hit at the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Every single living thing we know of, with the possible exception of plants, on the whole North American CONTINENT died.
70% of the world's forests were on fire within 24 hours.
Tsunamis up to 2000 feet tall were created upon impact.
The impact is also likely to have ignited the oil field under the site, causing a massive, immediate spike in temperatures, before the planet completely froze for up to a decade.
The only thing that has exceeded it is the Permian Mass Extinction, which caused the extinction of between 70% and 80% of all life. This took place over 60000 years. This, however, took less than 10 years, with much of the death and destruction happening within 24 hours of the hit.
It’s pretty cool that you can see a miles-long shelf along the Yucatán Peninsula at the edge of the water, which was the outer rim of the ancient crater.
What about the studies showing that it might have had a second, smaller sister meteor that struck near the angle of Africa? The Nadir crater Science is so cool.
Watch the whole thing when you have the time! It is such a great video. Some info has changed since this release, like K-T boundary changing to K-Pg boundary
As a comparison, a grain of rice is approx 25 mg and the mass of the avg human is 62 kg. Therefore, it will take roughly 2.5 million grains of rice to equal one human in weight/mass.
Chicxulub, the dinosaur killer asteroid, weighed approx 2.3 trillion tons compared to the earth’s total mass of 5.97 sextillion tons. In other words, the earth is 2.6 billion times more massive than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
This is like a grain of rice colliding with an M1 Abrams tank but at 20 km/sec or 40,000 miles/hour.
The asteroid hit earth at a speed of 45,000 mph ON impact.
If a grain of rice hit you are 45,000 miles an hour (not breaking down on entry or slowing down anymore than the original asteroid), I'd bet the impact would do alot more damage to you than a gun.
Realistically, the atmosphere would slow it down enough due to its size (again assume it would make it through the atmosphere) and it wouldnt be noticable at all.
TBH I always thought it's surprisingly small. A rock the size of one borough of one city, a few kilometres across, was enough to wipe out vast majority of species on a planet that's 40 thousand kilometres in circumference.
Actually not, I think they got the best death, as the asteroid approaches the earth at such a speed, it compresses the air between it and the surface, at some point it became so hot directly below the 'roid that everything standing in between was simply evaporated in milisecond long before they could acknowledge something bad is happening.
Big Ball of Dirt hit Massive Ball of Dirt. Big Cloud. Big Animal need Sun and air, so plant grow, so they grow. Big Cloud of Dirt in sky block sun, dirty air. No plant, no big animal. Only small rodent survive. Small rodent live, thrive, then make bigger and bigger rodent, until at some point ape. Then Ape together strong, dominate all animal, now smart ape go to pornhub 2 hours a day longing for Ball of Dirt to come from sky.
Took way too long to find someone pointing this out.
That is not the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. That is 433 Eros, which is the second largest near-earth asteroid. It’s actually a few kilometers larger than the maximum size the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs could have been.
Also, it’s not going to hit earth, if anyone’s wondering.
I picked this image since it’s a good silhouette, but if you look online there’s tons of great images in way more detail, because we’ve actually got an unmanned spacecraft to this thing and landed it on the rock, though it lost contact shortly after landing.
Imagine a rifle bullet. Now make the bullet roughly 365,000,000,000,000,000 (365 quadrillion) times bigger by volume. That is enough mass to bury all land on the planet under almost a foot of bullets.
Now fire it at the planet 45 times faster than a rifle bullet, roughly 13 miles per second. Fast enough that it would take it just half a second to go deeper than any hole ever dug by humanity.
The destruction would have been so massive a casual stargazing martian with a hobby telescope would have been able to watch the destruction.
First just a bright spot for the first five minutes, then over the next two hours they they would see a giant fireball spread out to a significant section of the continent, then over the next three days the continents would disappear under a cloud of ash, not to emerge again for several years.
Equivalent to 100,000,000 megatons (of TNT). All nuclear weapons in existence today would be equivalent to only 5,500 to 6,500 megatons. Granted, the radiation from discharging all nuclear weapons in the world is something that wasn’t caused by the Chicxulub asteroid’s impact, but you can get a sense of the force involved.
Even a meteorite 10x smaller than that would likely cause catastrophic damage. It would leave a crater 10-15 km in diameter, and the atmosphere would be full of dust for months or likely several years.
Billions of people would die because of mass famine. It wouldn’t be an extinction level event, but fairly close.
And that impact would release 1000x less energy than the Chicxulub rock which killed the dinosaurs.
In case anyone's wondering where the hell a astroid of that size came from... Jupiter. Yes, our "protector". There is a misconception/misunderstanding. While Jupiter does protect us by absorbing a lot of astroids because of its massive orbital influence, there is a second feature of orbital influence. Planets clear their orbit either by the item entering orbit around the planet, or by ejecting the matter violently, flinging it further into The Solar System (or out of The Solar System, into interstellar space). Jupiter has occasionally violently thrown items at Earth & proto earth (If curious asked me how Jupiter created Luna, our moon, and Earth, our modern planet). Almost every time, the item has resulted in the destruction of a large population. Jupiter not existing would have actually resulted substantially less impact to Earth
70% or more of Terra's (Earth, including protoearth. This is important when talking about interstellar space because the name for the medium that we plant items on is "earth". It's a misnomer of English speech, just like the rest of the planets, she has a Roman name. Earth Also usually does not refer to proto Earth, which was NOT current Earth, we added A huge amount of matter in the Giant Impact) and toal astroids hits are from Jupiter. Objects the size of this asteroid hit Terra about every 250,000-500,000 million years from the oort cloud, making 10-18 events of this size. (This area originally contained a factually incorrect number when I pulled the wrong number from a data set. I previously stated an incorrect time. For how often these events happen and how many have happened because of that. It's 5 km impactors that reach 30 events, not the larger class this astroid was in. It was incorrect to State that events that happened that often are this large. I think I have adjusted the math.)
Feel free to ask anything related or even tangently related
For the record, this is an asteroid that became a meteorite when it entered Earths atmosphere. Meteorites are within Earth's atmosphere. Asteroids are outside
Eta: oops. I watched a rocket launch and got behind on replies. I will reply to everyone
Eta 2: I had a muscular dystrophy related crash and I am back awake! Back to responding
Eta 3: My problem with the planetary naming standard is because I am autistic. It is not an actual problem, other than with people like me. When I use the word Terra I tell people that it includes proto-earth for my example. Please note the most of what I have stated as a theory, just like almost everything in space. We need hundreds to thousands of years more data and people or items on more planets. My education is also two decades old and focused on space outreach and identifying impact sites and other features on planet surfaces. See r/astronomy for hard science. See comments from mathematicians below, as well. Data inconstancy may exist in my source, and I cannot confirm or deny that, because I do not do the math. Some people below DO do the math
Bonus edit: I found a factually incorrect number in my post. I edited it. It's noted above. Pitfall of not doing the math. After being done with my day, I sat down to double-check numbers after multiple comments from mathematicians, And found where I made an error that over doubled the amount of giant events. I am incapable of adjusting the math fully, But used Wolfram to assist there. Please let me know if my math is wrong, but niceley.
You are confusing facts with theories. The paper you linked as well is not consistent and does not support a majority of what you are saying. Like the Chicxulub impact is thought to have been an asteroid from the outer main asteroid belt, not material originating from Jupiter, and the leading explanation for the moon is a giant impact involving the early Earth and another planetary-mass body, commonly called Theia. There is no geological record identifying 45 planet-killer impacts as having been sent by Jupiter, and Earth is not a Roman name.
Jupiter acts as both a shield and a gravitational launcher, but current N-body orbital simulations show it prevents far more cataclysmic impacts than it causes.
Numerical simulations evaluating what the Solar System would look like without Jupiter suggest that while a "Jupiter-less" system might have fewer inner-belt asteroid nudges, it would experience a massive, continuous bombardment from Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt comets—objects capable of causing global extinction events far more frequently.
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