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An asteroid strike can be unimaginably devastating. While NASA is tracking most hazardous asteroids, you can still know about the destruction a 700-foot asteroid strike on Earth is capable of.
Asteroids and comets are the biggest threat to humanity in the entire universe. Our entire solar system is filled with these space rocks ranging in size from a few millimeters to hundreds of kilometers. In fact, the largest asteroid in the solar system, Ceres, is 939 kilometers wide. And strangely, we don’t even require such humongous asteroids to destroy the Earth amd make humans go extinct. The horrific asteroid that killed all dinosaurs was merely 10 kilometers in size. But what if a monster 700-foot asteroid were to strike Earth tomorrow in the megacity of Los Angeles. How horrific could the damage be? It turns out that we do have a way to predict it.
Answering the above mentioned question with accuracy is difficult because of the vast amount of parameters which need to be considered. But thanks to Asteroid Launcher, an interactive web application designed by coder Neil Agarwal, some of the answers to the question can be found within seconds. The interactive map is part of multiple educational applications which helps you do a bunch of things from solving a trolley problem to even designing the next iPhone.
What damage can a 700-foot wide asteroid do?
For this particular experiment, we picked a 700-foot iron asteroid and made it strike the Earth at a speed of 50,000 miles per hour at an angle of 45-degrees in the city of Los Angeles.
The results were quite frightening.
The asteroid strike will instantly create a 3.4-mile wide crater that would go a shocking 1,609 feet deep into the Earth. Just the impact itself would vaporize 63,097 people. Yes, over 50,000 people will be killed instantly. The energy released from the impact would be as intense as 2 Gigatons of TNT. But that’s not all. The impact will also create a horrible 4.9-mile wide fireball which will be even more dangerous as it will claim as many as 4,148,132 lives. Trees would catch on fire within 39 miles of the impact. After that would come a 240 decibel shock wave that would rupture eardrums for as far as 19 miles and collapse homes in a range of 44 miles. But even that’s not the end of it. It would finally be followed by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake which would be felt even 80 miles away.
And just like that, the asteroid would have not only decimated one of the largest cities in the US but also caused severe fatalities in nearby regions as well as there will be huge amounts of dust and rubble thrown into space.
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