What was the larger meteorite that hit the earth?

Answer 1

I believe it was a meteor shower from the Leonid meteor shower, but it was as big as a football field probably.I think God did this because he wanted to make a new race, and the new race is us humans.

Answer 2

While there is no specific answer, there has been theorized to be 6 major impacts of meteors several miles across since the inception of life on earth that killed around 90% of the population of the planet. These ranged in size from 5-10 miles in diameter (for the Chicxulub Crater), to somewhere in the maximum of 100 miles across, which would represent the largest impact crater in the solar system, the Aitken Basin on the moon, which is arounc 1,300 miles in diameter, or a crater half the size of the US. If you look at the millions of craters on the moon, that justified that there are tens of millions of impacts on the earth, because the bombardment of bollide objects would have hit both equally. That said, anything more than a few miles across would have a devastating impact on earth, and would kill around 90% of the earth's population of all animals and plants. The fact that the earth has survived around six of these types of events, lends credence that you can't kill everything on earth, because evolution didn't start from scratch each time.

One interesting addendum, there is an unproven theory that Mars was hit with an object around 400 miles across. The interesting thing about a bolide impact from an object that size is that it would be roughly ten times thicker than the crust of either earth, or mars, and cause instant opening in the crust, and lava flows thousands of miles long. The same would be true for an impact object roughly 40 miles across.

Answer 3

The largest object believed to have ever hit Earth was a planetoid about the size of Mars. The current leading theory is that debris thrown into space by this impact eventually formed the moon. This impact occurred when the solar system was young and chaotic and the planets were still forming.

Answer 4

It's essentially impossible that an asteroid could "destroy" the Earth. A lot of scientists believe the Giant Impact Hypothesis of the Moon's origin, in which a body about the size of Mars hit Earth and basically "splashed" up a Moon-sized chunk (actually probably quite a bit more than that, but some of it came back down again). You may have noticed that Earth was not destroyed, but is in fact still here.

However, it's not very likely that much in the way of life would survive such an impact if one were to happen today. If that's what you meant, a much smaller impact would do. The K-T extinction event that wiped out about three-quarters of all species on Earth is connected with a meteorite about six miles in diameter.

Answer 5

Define "threaten". It would take a collision between the Earth and another body of similar size to actually destroy the Earth; an 8,000 mile ball of rock isn't especially fragile. The Earth has already survived impacts that large; one of them created the Moon.

But if you're talking about human civilization, or life in general, that's a lot more sensitive. A rock a couple of hundred feet in diameter would do a lot of damage to whatever region it hit. Unless it hits Nevada; probably nobody would notice.

A rock a half-mile in diameter would probably devastate a continent; if it hit in the ocean, probably both continents. There's an interesting speculation that an asteroid perhaps that size impacted in the Indian ocean about 5,000 years ago, and that numerous myths and legends of a world-inundating flood was the result. You probably already have heard the name "Noah"; Google the "Burckle Formation" , and "Gilgamesh epic" for more tantalizing concepts.

The asteroid or comet that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, about 65 million years ago, killed off the dinosaurs and about 70% of all large land animals. That one was about 10 miles long. We can't know if this is related to an interesting pattern of shattered rock and volcanism in Asia known as the "Deccan traps", but at least one theory suggests that the shock wave of the impact was transmitted THROUGH the Earth to erupt on the other side.

There have been bigger ones. 252 million years ago, the "Permian Extinction" described something that killed off 95% of all life on the Earth. We can't know that this was caused by an impact event, but the possibility can't be ruled out.

Answer 6

That might have been the meteorite/planetesimal that created our Moon.

Answer 7

For the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the Dinosaurs approximately 65 million years ago, the estimated size was only 6 miles or 10 kilometers in diameter.

Answer 8

Probably around 10 kilometers / 6 miles in diameter. At that size, we perfer not to call things "meteors" (or even "meteorites"). It was likely an asteroid or a comet.

Answer 9

Jared is a jackass