Abstract

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid about 10 km in diameter struck the Yucatan Peninsula creating the Chicxulub crater. The crater has been dated and found to be coincident with the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, one of six great mass extinctions in the last 600 million ye... Show moreAbout 66 million years ago, an asteroid about 10 km in diameter struck the Yucatan Peninsula creating the Chicxulub crater. The crater has been dated and found to be coincident with the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, one of six great mass extinctions in the last 600 million years. This event precipitated one of the largest episodes of rapid climate change in Earth's history, yet no modern three-dimensional climate calculations have simulated the event. Similarly, while there is an ongoing effort to detect asteroids that might hit Earth and to develop methods to stop them, there have been no modern calculations of the sizes of asteroids whose impacts on land would cause devastating effects on Earth. Here, we provide the information needed to initialize such calculations for the K-Pg impactor and for a 1 km diameter impactor. Show less