A 20 to 30 Mile Comet Fragmenting Could Generate a Million Catastrophic Impact Events

The Taurid meteor stream - the debris field of a massive fragmenting comet that Randall has been tracking throughout his research - is, he argues, the most probable mechanism behind some of Earth's past catastrophes, including the Younger Dryas impact event. The stream represents the accumulated debris of a hierarchical breakup process that began tens of thousands of years ago and has been seeding the inner solar system with objects of varying size ever since.

The scale of what a single large comet entry can produce is the detail Randall finds most significant. A comet with a diameter of 20 to 30 miles entering the inner solar system and breaking up does not produce one impact event. It produces approximately a million objects the size of the Tunguska object that exploded over Siberia in 1908 - an event that flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest from a single mid-air detonation. The broader framework Randall is pointing toward is one where the billions of comets sitting in the outer reservoirs of the solar system represent a standing threat - one that requires only a gravitational perturbation from a passing star or a planetary alignment to send a few dozen inbound. A few dozen is all it takes. The math does the rest.

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