How close can a meteor pass earth to cause damage?

Answer 1

Well, it depends on the size of the meteorite you're talking about. If you want to cause a small crater, then go anywhere from a few meters across to a small house in diameter. If you want to cause some minor effects, get something from the size of a large house to 150ft in diameter (Meteor Crater in Arizona.) If you want to cause some major effects to mass extinction, use a meteor the size of 1 mile to 20 miles in diameter or a comet. (One that killed the dinosaurs.) If you want to cause a cataclysmic explosion which can have a shock wave reach Earth's antipodal point, use something +60mi in diameter. (Shockwave goes all the way around the Earth.) If you want to completely destroy the Earth, use a asteroid the size of Venus or larger.

Answer 2

Most cause none at all, because they are tiny pieces of ice, rock or dust that burn up in the Earth's atmosphere and there is nothing left. Very few survive the Earth's atmosphere. Of those that do, most will cause no damage, being too small or because they will land in the sea or isolated areas. Extremely rarely a big one will land and cause some damage like a crater, such as the famous one in Arizona. There is also a famous one that struck a remote part or Russia, known as the Tunguska meteor that knocked a large area of forest. There have been some very large ones through ancient history that caused greater damage, but all of these are extremely rare. So we can go out and look into the night sky and enjoy them at no risk whatsoever.

Answer 3

A meteorite is a space rock that has survived passing through the Earth's atmosphere and falling to the Earth. The effect on the Earth is generally minimal, but depends on the size; at least a dozen times in the past 100 million years, large objects have struck the Earth with devastating effect. We're fairly certain that a large comet or asteroid struck the Earth about 65 million years ago, wiping out 75% of all life on Earth, including all the dinosaurs.

Arizona's Meteor Crater may simply be the most obvious, but other impactors may have caused the Great Flood of The Bible (a strike in the Indian ocean that created the Burckle crater on the seafloor), and killed off the woolly mammoths and mastodons 14,000 years ago and caused the Younger Dryas mini-ice age.

The Earth is struck by tens of thousands of meteoroids each day; most burn up passing through the atmosphere. But there are still thousands of meteorites littering the ground, especially in the Outback of Australia, Antarctica and the deserts of the American Southwest.

Answer 4

Damage done by a meteorite can vary depending on size. A large enough meteorite could cause large mammals to go extinct, a large meteorite could also leave a giant impact crater or destroy infrastructure, small meteorites may do no damage at all.

Answer 5

Many larger meteors explode in airbursts while passing through the atmosphere, and these generally don't cause much damage. However, the Tunguska meteorite (there is still some debate about exactly WHAT it was) did cause an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb, and flattened dozens of square miles of Siberian forests. (There were no good records of who lived where back then, so we have no idea how many people may have been killed; not many, but probably a few.)

Answer 6

The meteorite falls to Earth and lands on the surface.