That width is less than the distance I drive from my house to the grocery store. Why was that size of an asteroid able to cause such catastrophic damage?
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> That width is less than the distance I drive from my house to the grocery store.
Phrasing it that way makes it sound small, but you could also phrase it as “If you gently set the asteroid on the Earth’s surface at sea level, its top would reach up higher than the tallest mountain range on the planet.” Imagine Mount Everest, but bigger, and then imagine it’s moving towards you at the speed of a rifle bullet—*except it’s actually moving twenty times faster than that.* It’s moving so fast it passes from the top of the atmosphere down to sea level in less than ten seconds.
Having decent estimates for the size and mass of the asteroid, it’s simple to calculate the amount of energy it delivered to the impact site using Ek=1/2mv^(2). Taking a low estimate of 4×10^15 kg and 20 km/s, the impact released 8×10^23 Joules of energy, the equivalent of almost two hundred million 1-megaton nuclear bombs piled up in one spot and detonated simultaneously.
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