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Thread: Large Meteor Impact and World Damage

  1. #1
    Guild Novice Facebook Connected sirsig's Avatar
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    Help Large Meteor Impact and World Damage

    Hey, Ive been toying with the idea of a large meteor impact for my campaign world when trying to ascertain a world map from the continents.

    The idea is the main landmass was a Pangaea style continent until the meteor hit and made a crater around 3000kms (open to size change) radius.

    The attached image gives a vague idea.

    Dead centre is a bunch of islands / archipelago.

    Now considering the impact im trying to envision a real world kind of result in the landmasses that survive ie more islands and where they would sit.

    Any input would greatly be appreciated.


    ps. the pic is a quick dirty scribble in PS to give a rough idea. There's now 3 main continents and main rpg action is the one on the right.
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  2. #2
    Guild Expert Guild Supporter Lingon's Avatar
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    This is a neat idea! I look forward to seeing where you go with this

    A 3000 km crater is pretty enormous… The largest confirmed in the solar system is about 2500 km I believe, and the largest on Earth is far, far smaller. It's certainly plausible! But on a planet hosting life, it would probably cause an extinction event more extreme than anything that's occurred here. I'm no expert on this at all, but I imagine that the dust clouds thrown up by the impact would make the planet completely dark and uninhabitable for… well, I don't know really, but millions of years wouldn't surprise me. So, what I'm trying to say here is, this crater is probably extremely old (I assume some sort of civilization has evolved after the impact), and would therefore be very, very eroded and possibly deformed by tectonic movement as well. So the exact shape of the crater and the placement of islands is pretty much up to you, depending on how deep into the science you want to go

    Otherwise, I'd suggest moving the crater a bit to the top left, just showing the coasts of the northern and western continents; this puts the right landmass in focus and gives a more harmonious composition

  3. #3
    Guild Novice Facebook Connected sirsig's Avatar
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    Thanks for your thoughts Lingon, much food for thought.

    I should have said that the impact is indeed a long time ago, never really fixed a time frame as the the impact idea has only come up recently to help explain the rough world map i envisioned years ago.

    I can certainly downsize the impact size. Ive just been toying with distances based of the maps ive done. And also the far left continent had a ala pilgrims/mayflower kinda trip to the east continent 100's of yrs ago so im pegging a kinda 5000km kinda trip.

  4. #4

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    A crater that big would probably fill with water too. Like Lake Taupo in NZ, a massive crater from a super volcano that filled with water.

  5. #5

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    A meteor that size hitting a planet with water that hosts life would pretty much destroy all life on the planet, hands down. Life would have to start completely over again, and if there is a civilization on the world, then the impact would have been so long ago that the crater would no longer be visible, having been morphed by the movement of tectonic plates over hundreds of millions, if not billions of years. Unless it happened and then some sort of a god or divine being manipulated the atmosphere of the planet and all of the other things that would need to be done and then introduced life, including sapient life to the planet. I mean... I have this going on to SOME degree in my book series, so it's not as out there as it might sound. But yeah, the impact would be way too devastating for anything to survive. There are some good documentaries available on Youtube about meteor impacts and their effects, and I believe I have a pdf stashed somewhere on this laptop about it as well.

  6. #6
    Guild Novice Facebook Connected sirsig's Avatar
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    I do have a fairly active, somewhat hands on at times pantheon. So Godly intervention could be at play quite easily against the cataclysm as such.

    I also have a fairly advanced civilization that the "1st man to die" basically got elevated to god of death/etc as the position didnt exist at the time.

    Guess i could kinda tie in all these elements. Have a somewhat circular but heavily eroded ocean between the 3 continents.


    Hmm all ur input is helping

  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by sirsig View Post
    I do have a fairly active, somewhat hands on at times pantheon. So Godly intervention could be at play quite easily against the cataclysm as such.

    I also have a fairly advanced civilization that the "1st man to die" basically got elevated to god of death/etc as the position didnt exist at the time.

    Guess i could kinda tie in all these elements. Have a somewhat circular but heavily eroded ocean between the 3 continents.


    Hmm all ur input is helping
    This is just me but if you did decide to make it an ocean perhaps you could have it that the meteor landed on the barrier of 2 tectonic plates, weakening the crust there and having it create a line of underwater volcanoes between 2 continents. Think plumes of lava pushing up from a deep ocean floor and forming a landmass on the surface of the ocean like Iceland. Your pilgrims would have to travel thousands of miles across a volcanic, volatile land bridge which would be rather interesting in my opinion.

    Feel free to completely ignore or use my idea.
    Last edited by Althaen; 12-23-2013 at 08:52 PM.

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