High-Altitude Asteroid Impact

66 million years ago, the dinosaur empire was in its death throes when its final nail in the coffin came hurtling down from the sky. A clump of rock the size of Mount Everest smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, bringing about the end of 70-75% of all species. How?

1. The impact tossed out about 500 billion tons of debris into the atmosphere, some of which escaped into space.
2. The atmospheric temperature rose to the extent of provoking multiple spontaneous combustion, merging together into global forest fires.
3. The impact melted the surrounding rock.
4. The asteroid couldn't have landed at a worse place on Earth. The Gulf of Mexico was rich in sulfur and carbon, which many scientists believed compounded and even prolonged the fall of the dinosaur empire. From the sulfur, the first few years of the catastrophe saw a five-degree-Celsius drop in temperature before spiking up to a 20-degree rise that persisted for millennia, thanks to the carbon.
5. The impact left behind a crater 93 miles wide and 12 deep.

Now let's say that the Chicxulub asteroid landed today in a different spot--the top of the Tibetan Plateau (last I checked, nil amounts of sulfur and carbon.) Should an asteroid the size of Mount Everest slam into the heart of Tibet, far above sea level, would the aftermath of a high-altitude asteroid impact be different from the below-sea-level impact of our timeline?

posted almost 6 years ago

JohnWDailey‭

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