8 Things That Would Happen If An Asteroid Hit Earth

3. Environmental Damage

It turns out that having a load of vaporised minerals in your atmosphere is really bad news.

The initially toasty atmosphere would eventually cool down. Depending on the minerals that were thrown into it, they could combine with the moisture in the air and fall as acid rain.

The amount of debris blocking the sun would cause global temperatures to fall. An average fall of 5°C worldwide would decimate ecosystems.

This, combined with the acid rain, would kill the majority of plant life and, as anyone who remembers primary school will know, disrupting a food chain in this way is a bad idea. Without plants to eat, herbivores die and with no more delicious herbivores around, the predatory carnivores bite the dust.

Many experts think that this is what did it for the dinosaurs (as opposed to the initial impact), causing their numbers to decline over thousands of years.

However, dinosaurs are not humans, and there's a chance that we might just be able to innovate our way out of this one.