How exactly would a meteor destroy the earth?
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Anything with enough mass and speed that hit the earth, lets say the one that took out the dinosaurs, it incinerates everything for hundreds of miles and spread huge rocky debris that’d fall out of the sky and kill stuff. It also created a pressure wave and tsunami. Those are the easy ones.
The rest is that it kicked enough debris that the cloud of it burning up in the atmosphere would increase the global temperature significantly, light more on fire potentially, all the fires would pour smoke into the atmosphere, and the impact is believed to have kick started volcano activity that further added to the climate catastrophe.
All this combines to destroy ecosystems world wide.
It’s not “just” the impact, but the many years of aftermath events it causes that do the majority of the work ruining the planet.
To destroy the earth as in breaking it apart, that meteor would probably have to be huge. Nearly moon sized or larger most likely. It would simply be like two large rocks hitting each other at high velocity.
But if by “destroy the earth”, you mean kill all life on earth, then the meteor wouldn’t have to be very large (several hundred km large or so?) to release enough energy to cause disruption to the atmosphere (which is a very very thin layer compared to the size of the earth) Another scenario is a huge amount of fire and material into the upper atmosphere which could block the sunlight from a large part of the earth for many years and that would cause a “nuclear winter” that would kill most plant life and therefore most animal life as well.
It’s hypothesised that the Moon was created when a planet the size of Mars impacted the Earth billions of years ago. The Earth is still here. A simple meteor isn’t going to do shit against the Earth. You’d be fucked though if one was large enough… just like the non avian dinosaurs.
A. If it is super massive, it will just destroy the Earth. This is not as likely, but possible.
B. This is the most likely. A smaller (but still relatively massive) object would do a bunch. It would destroy the area it hit. Then, the explosion would launch dirt and debris (think particulate matter) into the air. Now here’s the thing, much of this would be super fine and would create a barrier for light between the Sun and the Earth’s surface. Sunlight not hitting the surface would allow the planet to cool and cool. Also, lack of light would lead to plants not growing. So, we would freeze and starve in the relative dark. This is not to mention the possible tidal waves or other plate tectonic events the force generated.
C. There are other possibilities. Multiple collisions by relatively small bodies in a short time period. If they’re the remnants of a super nova, possible radioactive material. My favorite crazy possibility is that it will have an alien bacteria that will thrive on our planet and just take us out. But that is highly unlikely.
The earth itself would be fine. One asteroid won’t destroy the planet itself. But the impact would be catastrophic for almost anything living on the planet at the time.
There’s likely never going to be a meteor that actually destroys the earth. When people say it’s going to destroy the earth, they mean make life on earth extinct. I assure you, the earth will continue to exist for a while yet, with or without life.
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