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What if the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit Earth today, in the same place?

The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs came down just off Mexico's Yucatán coast, and Mérida, nearly a million people, sits inside that crater zone today. We moved the strike to now and followed what the published studies say happens next, through the blast and the wave to almost two years of darkness.

Published 27 October 2026 · 2 min 5 s · Animated with AI tools

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Credits

  • Music: Trevor Kowalski / Down to Seconds / courtesy of Epidemic Sound (epidemicsound.com). Sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound.
  • Street and coast layouts for Chicxulub Puerto and Mérida: © OpenStreetMap contributors (openstreetmap.org/copyright). Coastlines: Natural Earth.
  • © 2026 BrightDragon Systems Ltd. A BrightDragon Studios film.
  • Animated with AI tools.

Sources

Every fact is checked. Spot an error? Report it and we'll correct it publicly.

  1. Asteroid struck about 66 million years ago: New evidence comet or asteroid impact was last straw for dinosaurs (UC Berkeley News, 2013, on Renne et al. in Science), https://news.berkeley.edu/2013/02/07/new-evidence-comet-or-asteroid-impact-was-last-straw-for-dinosaurs/
  2. Bigger than Mount Everest (8,848.86 m): China, Nepal say Everest a bit higher than past measurements (AP, 2020), https://apnews.com/article/science-nepal-china-58bae27255ab0865f97c303c4ebc3aa8
  3. About 10 km wide, moving 20 km every second: A moment that changed Earth (US National Science Foundation, 2022), https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/moment-changed-earth
  4. Hits right on the Yucatán coast; Mérida sits inside the crater zone: The Chicxulub impact and its environmental consequences, Morgan et al. (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2022, free copy via NSF; crater about 200 km wide, half onshore and half offshore), https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10349743; A steeply-inclined trajectory for the Chicxulub impact, Collins et al. (Nature Communications, 2020; crater centre about 37 km from Mérida), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15269-x
  5. Nearly a million people live there (995,129 in Mérida municipality, 2020 census): Mérida (Data México, Mexican Ministry of Economy, 2020), https://www.economia.gob.mx/datamexico/es/profile/geo/merida
  6. Roughly 100 trillion tonnes of TNT, billions of Hiroshima bombs (estimates vary): A moment that changed Earth (US National Science Foundation, 2022), https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/moment-changed-earth; Morgan et al. (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2022; about 5 × 10²³ J, roughly 120 trillion tonnes), https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10349743
  7. A crater around 200 km wide, formed within minutes; quake energy of magnitude 10 to 11: Morgan et al. (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2022), https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10349743; Real-World Apocalypse (EarthDate, 2019), https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/real-world-apocalypse
  8. The heat scorches land 1,000 km away: The first day of the Cenozoic, Gulick et al. (PNAS, 2019), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909479116
  9. Near the blast, winds top 1,000 km/h; air blast damage to about 1,500 km: Regional Effects, Chicxulub Impact Event (Lunar and Planetary Institute), https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/regional-effects/
  10. Waves over a kilometre high, racing at about 700 km/h: The Chicxulub impact produced a powerful global tsunami, Range et al. (AGU Advances, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000627; The tsunami triggered by the Chicxulub impact, Arbic, Johnson and Titov (Physics Today, 2024), https://physicstoday.aip.org/quick-study/the-tsunami-triggered-by-the-chicxulub-impact
  11. Waves reach the North Atlantic within an hour and most coastlines inside two days, and die out within a week: Dinosaur-killing asteroid triggered global tsunami (University of Michigan, 2022), https://news.umich.edu/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-triggered-global-tsunami-that-scoured-seafloor-thousands-of-miles-from-impact-site; End-Cretaceous asteroid caused massive global tsunami (AGU, 2022), https://news.agu.org/press-release/end-cretaceous-asteroid-caused-massive-global-tsunami-peaking-at-a-mile-high
  12. Fine rock dust hangs in the air for years; within two weeks plants can no longer grow; darkness for almost two years (620 days); sunlight recovers by about year 4: Chicxulub impact winter sustained by fine silicate dust, Senel et al. (Nature Geoscience, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01290-4
  13. Darkness for almost two years; temperatures fall up to 15°C across three years: On transient climate change at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary due to atmospheric soot injections, Bardeen et al. (PNAS, 2017), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708980114
  14. Darkness, not the blast, kills almost all human life (our conclusion, from climate models; a far smaller soot load from nuclear war would starve over 5 billion): Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection, Xia et al. (Nature Food, 2022), https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
  15. 66 million years ago it killed about three-quarters of all species: Morgan et al. (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2022), https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10349743
  16. Today we'd likely see this coming; roughly 95% of near-Earth asteroids over 1 km found: Near-Earth Asteroids (NASA, 2025), https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids-comets-meteors/near-earth-asteroids; The comet conundrum (Aerospace America, AIAA, 2023), https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/the-comet-conundrum/
  17. No known asteroid threat for at least 100 years: Is NASA Aware of Any Earth-Threatening Asteroids? (NASA, 2021), https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/is-nasa-aware-of-any-earth-threatening-asteroids-we-asked-a-nasa-scientist-episode-14/
  18. In 2022 NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, changing its orbit (33 minutes shorter in the peer-reviewed measurement; NASA's first figure was 32): NASA Confirms DART Mission Impact Changed Asteroid's Motion in Space (NASA, 2022), https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroids-motion-in-space/; New data from DART mission show a 33-minute change in asteroid orbit after impact (Northern Arizona University, 2023, on Thomas et al. in Nature), https://in.nau.edu/news/dart-study/

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