8 Things That Would Happen If An Asteroid Hit Earth

8. The Asteroid

There are few asteroids that enjoy a celebrity status but, as lumps of space rock go, the one that did it for the dinosaurs is pretty famous.

We'll imagine, then that our asteroid is a twin of this.

Estimated to be around 10 km (or six miles) across, it blew a crater into the Earth's crust around 180 km wide. This wasn't just a cosmetic issue either, as the impact released a massive amount of energy, enough to vaporise the asteroid itself and put paid to the whole dino thing that the Earth had going on at the time.

Neither that asteroid, nor our hypothetical one, is large enough to turn our planet into a belt of asteroids itself, it wouldn't even kill all life instantly. Far from being a good thing, this would mean that there would still be people around to enjoy the long-drawn out apocalypse.

So, what would it look like?