What would the outcome of an asteroid hitting Evansville, Indiana look like? Spoiler Alert: Not so good!

There's always been something fascinating to me about movies like Deep Impact, Armageddon, more recently the movie Green Land, and other disaster films about a meteor impacting Earth. The movies make it look so devastating, but in reality, how bad would it be? Of course, that depends on a few factors such as the size of the asteroid, its speed, and the impact angle. In the movies, it looks something like this:

After seeing scenes in movies like that, it's hard not to wonder what would happen if an asteroid hit your city. Well, wonder no more. There is a website called Asteroid Launcher, created by developer Neal Agarwal, that goes into great detail to show you exactly what the impact of an asteroid would look like anywhere in the world...and it's terrifying.

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Asteroid Launcher is pretty easy to use, and you can go through a variety of scenarios. You can tinker around with things to see all of the different outcomes. When you first start, you will select the asteroid's composition, meaning you can choose from iron, stone, carbon, comet, and gold. Next, you will have to select the diameter, or the size of the asteroid, its speed, and the impact angle of the asteroid. Finally, you pick the impact location anywhere on the planet, and then see the devastation. I did this for Evansville, Indiana, and the outcome was not so good for us.

What Would an AsteroidHitting Evansville Look Like?

Once again, that answer depends on a few variables. I messed around on Asteroid Launcher with a couple of scenarios and these were the outcomes.

The first scenario was with an iron asteroid that was 1,000 feet in diameter, at a speed of 50,000 miles, and had an impact angle of 22 degrees. This is what would happen to Evansville and the surrounding area in that case:

The impact crater would be 3.4 miles wide and 1,607 feet deep. An estimated 17,225 people would be vaporized in the crater.

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This would lead to a 6.4-mile-wide fireball. An estimated 201,567 people would die from the fireball.

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On top of that, we would have a 246-decibel shock wave sent throughout the region. Buildings within 43 miles would collapse and homes within 57 miles would collapse. Plus anyone within 19 miles would likely receive lung damage, and anyone within 25 miles would likely have ruptured eardrums.

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The list of effects keeps coming too.  We would see an 11,101 mph peak wind speed with an estimated 70,916 people dying from the wind blast. Asteroid Launcher says "within 38 miles it would feel like being inside an EF5 tornado."

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Finally, we would have a 6.9 magnitude earthquake as a result.  An estimated 419 people would die from the earthquake, and the earthquake would be felt 110 miles away!

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The second scenario that I ran was a gold asteroid that was a mile wide, with a speed of 250,000 mph, and an impact angle of 90 degrees. This, looks like the worst-case scenario, according to Asteroid Launcher...and it's terrifying!

An asteroid of this size would lead to an 80-mile-wide and .80 miles deep impact crater. There would be an estimated 429,926 people would be vaporized in the crater.

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An impact of this size would lead to a 159-mile-wide fireball, with an n estimated 69,170,228 people dying as a result.

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We would see a 247-decibel shock wave from this impact. An estimated 16,256,012 people would die from the shock wave.

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Winds would hit a peak speed of 11,854 mph! An estimated 60,749,460 people would die from the wind blast.

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Finally, we would feel a 9.7 magnitude earthquake, with an estimated 195,437 people dying from the earthquake. It would be the largest earthquake in recorded history.

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Scary results, right? You can mess around with different scenarios too for any location in the world on Asteroid Launcher by clicking here.

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