This whole region, downrange, would have been incinerated. It would have been incinerated just by this plasma, this exploding vapour plume engulfing everything. There would have been winds that would have been going so fast. It could pick up houses and spread them hundreds of kilometres away. This would have been Armageddon. 

 

Experiments like this reveal several important things. One is that it’s not just the impact. It’s all that vapour that runs downrange. In fact, you can see areas here where there was so much wind it actually carved out pieces of this landscape. So what these experiments help us do? They actually allow us to witness the event, see it in real time and try to understand the processes that are going on. It’s really complex but we have to see it to understand it. So asteroid impacts unleash a trail of destruction far greater than suggested by the footprint of the crater alone.