Jul 14, 2026 · 37 min · 19 segments
You probably knew an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but it was so much worse than that. Asteroids and other space rocks have been the most destructive forces ever to hit Earth, yielding mass…
Cristina ThomasGuestAstronomer Christina Thomas, she's at Northern Arizona University, and also partners with NASA.
[dinosaur growling] You probably know an asteroid wiped them out, but the level of destruction was so far beyond that.
Imagine Mount Everest slamming from space into a shallow ocean at a speed 20 times faster than a sniper bullet.
[comet crashing] It blistered the ground, burrowed for miles, vaporized, and caused an explosion orders of magnitude bigger than every nuclear weapon on Earth firing at once.
The impact pushed out air with force enough to crush everything for 1,000 miles around it.
What I took away from it was like, you know, we shouldn't really blame the dinosaurs for not making it through that one.
It didn't just take out the name brands, the T-rex and triceratops, it killed three-quarters of all the organisms on the planet.
Recent evidence suggests two billion years ago, an asteroid at least twice as large as that, a fiery ball the size of Atlanta, crashed down.
[comet crashing] It bit deep, broke off a section of the Earth, flung it into orbit.
Astronomer Christina Thomas, she's at Northern Arizona University, and also partners with NASA.
[dinosaur growling] You probably know an asteroid wiped them out, but the level of destruction was so far beyond that.
Imagine Mount Everest slamming from space into a shallow ocean at a speed 20 times faster than a sniper bullet.
[comet crashing] It blistered the ground, burrowed for miles, vaporized, and caused an explosion orders of magnitude bigger than every nuclear weapon on Earth firing at once.
The impact pushed out air with force enough to crush everything for 1,000 miles around it.
What I took away from it was like, you know, we shouldn't really blame the dinosaurs for not making it through that one.
It didn't just take out the name brands, the T-rex and triceratops, it killed three-quarters of all the organisms on the planet.
Recent evidence suggests two billion years ago, an asteroid at least twice as large as that, a fiery ball the size of Atlanta, crashed down.
[comet crashing] It bit deep, broke off a section of the Earth, flung it into orbit.
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