Word: tunguska
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...only 49,000 years ago that an iron asteroid blasted out Arizona's three-quarter-mile-wide Meteor Crater, almost certainly killing any living creatures for hundreds of miles around. As recently as 1908, a small rocky asteroid or chunk of a comet exploded five miles above the Tunguska region of Siberia, felling trees, starting fires and killing wildlife over an area of more than 1,000 sq. mi. Had the blast, now estimated at tens of megatons, occurred over New York City or London, hundreds of thousands would have died...
Almost as worrisome are the estimated 300,000 asteroids larger than 300 ft. wide that also come perilously near or intersect Earth's orbit; each could inflict Tunguska-like damage over a large region. The number of Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 60 ft. across, says University of Arizona astronomer Tom Gehrels, could be as high as 100 million. A hit by any one of them could destroy a large city...
...monsters that we need to worry about are the monsters. One of these massive asteroids intersected the orbit of the Earth on June 30th 1908. Six miles above Tunguska, Siberia, it exploded with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima. Almost 500,000 acres of forest were destroyed. The shockwave was strong enough to be detected in America...
...Brian G. Marsden, associate director for planetary sciences at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, rates the chance of a Tunguska-sized asteroid hitting the Earth during the next 100 years as "excellent," and gives smaller but significant odds to an even larger asteroid strike...
Measuring only 60 meters across, the Tunguska asteroid pales in size compared to the one kilometer asteroids which could cause a global climate change, or the 10 kilometer mass to which most scientists attribute the extinction of the dinosaurs...