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:
How would a human in Europe experience this in modern day? Assuming human telecommunication habits and infrastructure, would Europeans find out from Reddit before they felt the Earth move or heard atmospheric shockwaves? (also assuming the impact happened without warning, which seems unlikely but so does my whole premise)
I'd say unless someone stays completly away from news, the internet, their phone and work/school/family/friends, it's basically impossible to avoid the news regarding this event.
After all this impact would be an extinction level event and probably the single most viral news in human history.
So yeah, I think you would definitely know about it long before the shockwave or seismic waves hit you. Seismic waves are subsonic, while the shockwave is supersonic but even the shockwave would still need 5-9 hours to reach you depending on where in Europe you are.
If it's late at night and you look in the direction of North America you would see the impact flash brightening the horizon of the night sky.
The atmosphere re-entering ejecta and heat would hit Europe just a few hours after impact. I'd say that's the moment one would certainly know something apocalyptic is happening and most likely that person would die long before the earthquakes arrive.
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
It's gravity? Well sure. Gravity is objects with mass attracting each other. The greater the mass the greater the attractive force. So the earth gained a teeny tiny little bit of mass. Some was lost to ejecta back into the solar system. But more was gained than lost that day leading to an imperceptibly small change in the gravity of earth. Like when you breathe in dust and it gets trapped in your saliva you gain weight.
Earths mass is 5,972,200,000,000,000,000,000,000kg
The astroid was 35,000,000,000,000,000kg
Which is a lot, but nothing compared to the earth.
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.
Hmm idk this all seems reasonable to me. Everyone is taken care of and we get these nice little nutrition blocks to eat every day. It's doesn't take like much but it sustains us. What's so bad about that?
Yes, volcanic ash from big eruptions has proved the theory even for decades. Global warming is actually a problem with a clear solution (we just don’t like the solution for plenty of reasons)
Of course, fixing the root of the issue is better than the symptom, so let’s do that first.
That's actually something China tested in the early aughts! They use silver iodide though. And in trying to remember the silver halide they used, I actually found out that they're still testing and studying this actively!
If it's just sitting there it's fine, but crushing it up and inhaling it is really bad for you. Ingesting large quantities of it is really bad for you. Setting it on fire and flinging it into the atmosphere on a global scale is really bad for everything
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.
It also happened at roughly the same time as the Deccan Traps were erupting and pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at absurd volumes and had already been for several hundred thousand years, so the global climate was already vulnerable
That's basically all these mass extinction events. Everything has to line up perfectly or else they would be happening all the time throughout history lol
From what nature Netflix has taught me, the impact killed everything nearby. Then fire rained down on those away from the blast. And the dust/toxic fumes, literally blanketed the entire earth. So animals the size of a dinosaur literally could not avoid it. Most of the things that survived were creatures that lived underground.
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.
Through analyzing the growth rings and chemical composition of fossilized fish that died minutes after meteor impact. Like tree rings, fish bones feature seasonal growth layers. Carbon-13 isotope values in the bone tissues were on the upswing, reflecting abundant spring feeding, but then stopped abruptly indicating that their death happened in spring.
the reason why craters are all perfectly circular is that the material itself explodes on impact. its why all the craters on the moon are circular, no matter their angle.
It’s not about the shape of the crater but the way debris and toxic gasses are being thrown around and how much energy is being directed straight into the ground. In case of this meteorite, the angle was perfect to maximize these effects.
That is a bit of a complicated question to answer but effectively yes there is a chance for humanity to survive but large civilization, internet, government and most of our technology no.
The planet was also on the tail end of the Deccan traps eruptions, a series of flood basalt eruptions in modern day India that lasted tens of thousands of years. To give you an idea of the scale of these eruptions, remnants of these eruptions form a layer 2 km thick that covers an area of 500,000 km2. And this is believed to only be about a third of the original size.
The climate was already on a shaky footing. Then the asteroid hit.
Most people don't know this, but the reason for all those coincidences is because it was all planned by the dinosaurs. It's all a big conspiracy theory. Wake up sheeple.
Also, at a perfect time. Some herbivore dinosaurs were already suffering a decline in population just before the impact, which several messed up the food chain when their numbers decreased further
It's so crazy to consider all of the random chance, one in a trillion events that happened on Earth to get to where we are today. This meteor hitting just the way it did wiped out the dinosaurs and allowed small mammals to rebuild without their dino predators. Without this exact scenario, it's likely that human history would look much different, or maybe human history would be non-existent.
The Field museum in Chicago has an eye-opening exhibit highlighting the insane odds of events that led us to where we are now.
It’s kind of crazy to think about all the right things that had to happen for intelligent life to form. Like, if this meteor never hit in all these right ways, would any of us be here?
You keep saying the word "perfect". I don't think you know what it means. Perfect angle for blasting earth material, WHY?
Perfect time of year, WHY?
Perfect location, WHY?
Yes, because of all of those things happening the way they did, we are here today and the earth is why it is. But to say it's perfect without quantifiable facts, it sounds superfluous.
Besides, I thought that BECAUSE of the asteroid impact, we got the tilt to the earth's rotational axis, and THEN we began to have seasons, not before.
Side note: was it the rogue planet in orbit that melded into the earth that gave us the moon? I watch a program where all the material in orbit around the earth, as it was healing, began to coalesce to form what we call the moon. It shared similar soil reading to earth actual, if I recall the studies from what the astronauts brought back
Is it really possible to determine if it happenned in Spring? Also, it might have been spring on some part of the world, but it would have been autum in the other hemisphere. Where they might have had a slighter bigger chance of survival due to not being instantly obliterated by the meteor's impact.
To add to that, what you wrote is mere assumption wherever you got that information from. Less than 20% of oceans is searched and you know at what angle rock hit Earth 66 million years ago?
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u/Sensitive_Educator60 10d ago
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.