brycetech opened this issue on Apr 11, 2006 ยท 6 posts
nomuse posted Wed, 12 April 2006 at 4:09 AM
Dropping rocks from orbit are we? Actually, any one of those (like that monster you've got taking out most of Australia) would pretty much kill 90% and counting of all living things on Earth. The Australian one alone looks bigger than Chicxulub -- Dinosaur-killer class or better.
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
Since the craters you show imply energies on order of 10^9 megatons of conventional explosives, I have a strong feeling that the total thermal loading of all of the craters depicted (plus all the water hits not shown explicitly) would for all practical purposes kill all life, strip the surface to bare rock, half-empty the oceans and blanket the planet in dust and water. I wouldn't want to land there without protection, not for several years anyhow. That's always assuming there isn't a total climate shift sending Earth into a new stable configuration as a frozen wasteland or a Venusian hell.
Oh, also for visualization; those craters are big enough to put ejecta into orbit. So there would be a halo of dust around the Earth. Plus of course for the next 2-10 years the atmosphere will be durn-near opaque (and a nice orange light to see by if you are on the ground).
If you are visualizing right after the impacts....well, then, most of those craters are lit up like stars -- the fireballs alone are tens of kilometers -- and the ejecta is coming back in like white-hot sleet. Basically the thing is a churning ball of yellow-white-red.