NASA Predicts Deadly Firestorms Following Major Asteroid Impact Event

NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) described what exactly would happen if Earth gets hit by an asteroid that’s over a kilometer wide. Aside from the massive explosion and extreme environmental effects, the violent impact event would cause firestorms to rain down on Earth.

According to CNEOS, which keeps track of asteroids that are known to dangerously approach Earth, the planet gets visited by small space rocks on almost a daily bases. Usually, these asteroids are too small to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. And so they simply burn up and disintegrate before reaching the ground.

However, every couple of thousands of years, CNEOS noted that Earth gets hit by decent-sized asteroids that are capable of causing disastrous impact events on the ground. In most cases, since these asteroids are only about a couple of hundreds of meters wide, their destructive effects are localized.

“With an average interval of about 10,000 years, rocky or iron asteroids larger than about 100 meters would be expected to reach the Earth’s surface and cause local disasters or produce the tidal waves that can inundate low lying coastal areas,” CNEOS explained in a statement.

Unfortunately, these aren’t the only asteroids that threaten Earth. According to the agency, every hundred thousands of years, Earth gets hit by an asteroid that’s so massive that its impact affects the planet on a global scale.

Similar to the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, asteroids that are over a kilometer long can produce enough impact energy to cause global disasters. Upon impact, a massive asteroid would send countless pieces of debris into space, which would fall back down to Earth as flaming rocks.

Aside from these, the initial impact would instantly destroy a large portion of Earth. The debris and smoke produced by the impact event would then cover the atmosphere and prevent sunlight from penetrating. This would kick-off an extreme weather event known as a nuclear winter. Without sunlight, many life forms on Earth would soon die out.

“On an average of every several hundred thousand years or so, asteroids larger than a kilometer could cause global disasters,” CNEOS stated. “In this case, the impact debris would spread throughout the Earth’s atmosphere so that plant life would suffer from acid rain, partial blocking of sunlight, and from the firestorms resulting from heated impact debris raining back down upon the Earth’s surface.”