Fatal impact
Benny Peiser, an anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University has shown through a computer simulation that more than 1,000 fatal impacts in a 100,000-year period. These fatal impacts were mostly airbursts over land. For instance, a 60-meter-wide object blew up above a remote Siberian forest. Other blasts occurred in or above the ocean triggering tsunami waves that inundated coastlines.
The 100,000-year scenario includes the potential for an impact involving a five-kilometer-wide asteroid that touches off a climate catastrophe, wiping out the human race. Peiser indicated 13 million deaths which could be traced to asteroid or comet impacts. In 1490, 10,000 people in China's Shanxi Province might have been killed after being hit by asteroids.
Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, has also referred to an impact event in the Rio Cuarto region of northern Argentina, in which an asteroid 100 to 300 meters across apparently skipped along the surface, leaving a series of gouges. The shallow path of a near-Earth object blazed through the atmosphere and hit northern Argentina around 2000 BC, Masse said.
This analysis reveals that around 2807 BC, the earth was hit by a cosmic impact in the deep waters between Africa and Antarctica.
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