Thor's Hammer

The harbinger of the extinction level event in Daria AE, Thor's Hammer was an impact event in which an asteroid (with a length of nearly 3000 miles and a diameter of over 1000 miles composed of nickel, iron and granite

Thor’s Hammer, it had been euphemistically called, but it resembled nothing more than a truly enormous bullet. At almost three thousand miles long and a thousand miles across, it was a solid mass of nickel, iron, and granite that had been spinning through space for eons until the sin’s gravity coaxed it inwards. Daria skimmed through part of a report about a probe being dispatched to Thor’s Hammer with several thousand megatons of nuclear firepower in an attempt to destroy it or push it off course. The probe returned with empty magazines and Earth’s death knell: Thor’s Hammer was still on course.

Daria put the report aside and concentrated on the imagery that had been collected form a myriad of orbiting observatories, starship scanners, and the Armstrong Research Station that had been built on the moon in the late nineteen seventies. Daria picked a series of view points that showed Thor’s Hammer approaching Earth and it’s predicted impact site, and then started the images advancing. Indicators popped uo showing that the doomsday rock was traveling at over seventy thousand miles an hour. The asteroids gravity had grabbed a collection of several hundred smaller rocks ranging in size from a pool ball to the size of Pittsburg -- civilization enders in their own right. Daria knew some of those fragments had reached Earth long before the actual asteroid itself.

The images rapidly until just a few minutes before the actual impact. Daria caught glimpses of escape ships leaving the atmosphere up until the last possible moment. Bright flashes of fragment impacts increased in frequency until it was an almost constant shimmering effect, and clouds of ejecta began to stain the thin layer of atmosphere a dark gray.

The main impact happened on the night side of the planed in the southern Atlantic Ocean, and the telescopes from Armstrong Station had recorded everything. Here was a massive flash of light as one end of the asteroid slammed home with world killing force. Less than an eye blink later, the atmosphere around the site turned to superheated plasma and blasted outwards at several dozen times the speed of sound. The blast wave didn’t have time to clear the diameter of Thor’s Hammer before the ocean evaporated below it and the ocean floor sublimated into magma with the impact.

Daria swallowed a lump in her throat as the images continued to play on the monitor. The whole thing bore an eerie similarity to high speed films she had seen of a rifle bullet blasting through an apple -- the once solid interior of the fruit was turned to liquid by the shockwave of from the bullet’s passage and exploded the skin outward.

The effect on Earth was almost identical. Tectonic plates almost a hundred miles thick were pulled outwards as easily as an apple skin. The magma they floated on wa driven up through fault lines and through volcanic cones and where it couldn’t find easy passage, it simply exploded out through the ground.