Scientists Simulated Bennu Crashing to Earth in September 2182. It's Not Pretty.

Simulations of a potential impact by a hill-sized space rock event next century have revealed the rough ride humanity would be in for, hinting at what it'd take for us to survive such a catastrophe.

It's been a long, long time since Earth has been smacked by a large asteroid, but that doesn't mean we're in the clear. Space is teeming with rocks, and many of those are blithely zipping around on trajectories that could bring them into violent contact with our planet.

One of those is asteroid Bennu, the recent lucky target of an asteroid sample collection mission. In a mere 157 years – September of 2182 CE, to be precise – it has a chance of colliding with Earth.

To understand the effects of future impacts, Dai and Timmerman used the Aleph supercomputer at the university's IBS Center for Climate Physics to simulate a 500-meter asteroid colliding with Earth, including simulations of terrestrial and marine ecosystems that were omitted from previous simulations.

It's not the crash-boom that would devastate Earth, but what would come after. Such an impact would release 100 to 400 million metric tons of dust into the planet's atmosphere, the researchers found, disrupting the atmosphere's chemistry, dimming the Sun enough to interfere with photosynthesis, and hitting the climate like a wrecking ball.

In addition to the drop in temperature and precipitation, their results showed an ozone depletion of 32 percent. Previous studies have shown that ozone depletion can devastate Earth's plant life.