if a 2km asateroid asteroid is going to hit earth could cause a global extinction??????

Question

ive been reading a lot of articles about asteroid global killers and i still don't believe that a 1 or 2km wide asteroud could cause an extinction. Some scientists says that a 100 km wide craters didnt cause extinction and now they are saying that a 1km wide asteroid enough to create a 10 to 20 km wide asteroid could cause an extinction ..... this scientists are really dumb

Answer 1

They are not really sure how big an asteroid would have to be to cause a mass extinction. I think 2km is a little small though. The largest Earth crossing asteroid,1866 Sisyphus, is about 10 km. This means we have no chance of getting hit by any asteroid bigger than 10km. The asteroid suspected of killing the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10km, but as I say, they are not completely sure.

Answer 2

Put this to thought: a 1km asteroid traveling at thousands upon thousands of miles per hour: how damaging do you think that could be?

Not only would it cause a crater, but dust and debris would be thrown up into the air, blocking out the sun and choking up life as we know it.

At first, I didn't believe it either, but after thinking about it, it made sense to me.

Also, remember the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens: it blocked out the Sun and caused ash showers to sorrounding areas for days. And that was just a volcanoe.

Answer 3

Some very good shows on the subject, on discovery channel are repeated quite often. A 2km coming in at 90,000km per hour would have enough energy and heat to throw up millions of tons of debris, which eventually cloud the skys definately affect the global food chain-no plant life. Earths ecology would be affected on a global scale to some degree; it would depend on where it struck and what its makeup was.

Answer 4

Its not the size of the asteroid, its the effect of its impact (the initial explosion, vaporization of the earth's surface or ocean and the asteroid itself), the location of the impact, and other factors.
By your reasoning, a kilogram of plutonium couldn't do as much damage as they "claim" when a nuclear weapon explodes - its just one kilogram of material, after all.

Answer 5

it has to be bigger than that to create a mass extinction it may wipe out some organisims and the animals that are left must adapt to their new envroment or maybe it may crash into the planet but give off a chain of event to create a mass extinction

Answer 6

well, once the rock hit the earth, the whole planet is a fireball. that should be able to kill everything. how come we dont go test it? load a large rock in a rocket, then dump it once it passed the atmosphere. LOL!

Answer 7

a meteor that is 500 meters would have caused major catastrophic disasters...check the URL below for calculation on impact result