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Originally Posted by TheOtherDave™
If the inbound fragments are larger than about 100 meters, you're going to have very serious problems when they strike the earth's surface.
If they hit land, you would probably see replays of the 1908 Tunguska event ( LINK).
If they strike off-shore, you could very well see massive tsunamis.
A direct hit from a 2.5km asteroid would be sufficient to wipe us off the map. So if nuclear weapons were employed to break a large asteroid up, IMO they ought to be employed at the earliest opportunity, not the last minute (as seen in Armageddon  ) |
This isn't entire correct. The Tunguska event was technically not a "strike" since there was no crater or impact site. The prevailing theory is that a comet fragment entered the atmosphere but exploded midflight, causing a shockwave that caused extensive damage across large parts of the Russian Empire. The destruction zone was, if memory serves, roughly 200km across. As an aside, the pattern of destruction was used by scientists in the 40's and 50's when they were designing nuclear weapons in order to find the maximum destructive potential of a given yield of a device.
Regardless, anything larger than say 100m across would be very, very bad. Anything over 50m and it's only bad for the people within a few hundred miles. So, if you live in Chicago, Memphis or Kansas City, don't root for an asteriod to take out Saint Louis, no matter how much you hate the Cardinals.