Not one big enough to cause another great extinction, but small enough to just turn a whole small country and parts of neighboring ones into a huge crater. Will the people who was evacuated out after NASA stated a warning try to rebuild the country after everything has settled down or do they’d become citizens of another country?

Edit: after reading the comments, maybe turning a small country into a crater is too much, what about just level the place, or in any way that make it uninhabitable for a period of time?

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
    321·
    8 months ago

    Not one big enough to cause another great extinction, but small enough to just turn a whole small country and parts of neighboring ones into a huge crater.

    …That’s a global extinction level event right there. The Chicxulub crater is about 120 miles in diameter, and and 12 miles deep. That’s the meteor that resulted in the die-off of all the dinosaurs. To put that in perspective, Slovenia–which is a pretty small country, geographically and culturally speaking–is about 70 miles north to south, and 140 miles east to west. An meteor that turned most of Slovenia into a crater, and parts of Croatia and Austria would also end up causing the same kind of global extinction that was caused 66M years ago. The resulting explosion from that kind of impact would immediately wipe out around 1/4 or Europe from the pressure wave. The vaporized rock would fill the atmosphere, and cause an immediate ice age; you could expect to see global famines due to crop failures, and an immediate drop in global temperatures of >3C.

    Any meteor that turns an entire country (aside from countries like The Vatican, Monaco, etc.) into a crater is going to cause a global extinction event.