[biot]

From the article:

> "This is a big object. An object of this size is going to have the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Brown said. "That'd be a regional impact. It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world."

[throwthrowuknow]

Not very comfortable with how much that sounds like downplaying the effects. It would be the largest disaster in all of human history. For reference the estimated strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States is about 820 megatons and the largest US test detonation was 15 megatons so an impact of this size would be on par with or possibly worse than an all out nuclear war between the US and Russia. God knows what kind of effects that kind of blast would have, it would probably kill half the US population on impact and light the entire east coast on fire. No idea what would happen to the rest of the world after that but the supply chain “disruption” alone would mean millions starving and without fuel or medicine.

[avar]

Nuclear weapons are targeted, an asteroid releasing 1000x the amount of energy of all the world's nuclear weapons isn't going to be 1000x worse. Perhaps it'll vaporize on impact in the middle of the Pacific.