What Happens If Asteroid Bennu Collided With the Earth?

Asteroid Bennu has been in the news a lot lately. Now it’s making headlines again as there is a chance it may collide with Earth.

Transcript

00:00asteroid Bennu has been in the news a lot lately that's because nasa's osiris-rex mission recently

00:08brought back and tested samples from it where they found most of the building blocks for

00:13biological organisms meaning life out in the cosmos is much more likely than previously believed now

00:18it's making headlines again all because there is a point zero four percent chance it will collide

00:23with earth in the year 2182 that's why south korean researchers have done the math and calculated just

00:28how horrific that impact might be the last major asteroid impact on earth was around 66 million

00:34years ago and was responsible for altering the trajectory of life on our planet forever the

00:38asteroid that created the chiksalub crater was between six and nine miles wide luckily benu is

00:43only around a third of a mile wide still that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a catastrophic impact

00:48according to the simulations run by the pusan national university researchers benu would inject

00:53up to 400 million tons of dust into the stratosphere which they say would drop global

00:58temperatures by four degrees celsius and reduce our planet's precipitation by 15 percent in addition

01:04the protective ozone layer around the world would also be drastically affected depleted by around 32

01:09percent with a 20 to 30 percent loss in photosynthesis in all our planet's ecosystems