Apophis: A Love Story for the End of the World

Prologue

It started with Russia.

In February 2013, a fragment of the 2011 EO40 asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere, officially becoming the chelyabinksk meteor. The giant rock had somehow been a surprise, catching the Russians unaware by hiding in the glare of the sun. Nearly fifteen hundred people were injured and whole buildings were destroyed, causing millions of dollars in damage. I remember watching online footage and thinking to myself that it had to have been an Internet hoax. This kind of thing didn't happen in real life, right? Asteroids. Meteors. Hordes of screaming people running to evade falling space debris when the meteor exploded in the sky. This was the stuff Hollywood made movies about; it wasn't supposed to be the Top Story on the Evening News.

Scientists first spotted our asteroid back in 2004. They named it 99942 Apophis. I used to wonder how and why they came up with these names. It's kind of like how someone arbitrarily decided to reclassify Pluto and voted it off the Planetary Survival Island. Who made these decisions? Did it matter which space rocks were big enough to be planets and which ones were simply asteroids? And why did they need names and designated numbers in the first place? In the case of our asteroid, the co-discoverers had chosen an appropriate name. In ancient Egypt, Apophis was the Greek name for the enemy of the sun god, Ra. Apophis was the deification of darkness. But these were all things I only learned about just as everything was coming to an end.

When I was just starting junior high, Apophis came within 19,400 miles of the Earth. Scientists around the globe did the math; they studied the trajectory of the giant space rock's next orbit, and when they didn't get the answer they were looking for, they checked the numbers again and again, but with the same results. We were doomed. Apophis was going to hit us.

Everyday, the asteroid traveled closer and closer to Earth like a doomsday calendar. Rumor has it that the government even consulted with Hollywood screenwriters responsible for all those films where the hero has to destroy a similar space threat. I guess Life really does imitate Art. But eventually the scientists convinced the government that it would only cause more damage if they--as all those apocalypse movies suggested--blew up the massive rock before it hit Earth, effectively splintering the asteroid into a million pieces. Instead of one giant impact zone, there would have been hundreds of thousands.

The days leading up to Apophis's impact were the worst. There was rioting in the streets and huddling in people's homes. It seemed like most people approached the End of Days in one of two ways – party hard until the world ended or stay at home and pray like hell it didn't happen.

When Apophis struck, things naturally got chaotic. The damage was unprecedented, but I suppose it could have been worse – we could have all died immediately on impact or drowned from a giant tsunami wave. Unexpectedly, the blow was softened by the shallow angle of the meteor's approach. Like the Russian meteor before it, Apophis exploded in the air before it actually hit the Earth's surface. The planet still turned into a piece of Swiss cheese from the resulting rubble, but we all thought we were going to be okay. We could rebuild from this. We hadn't shattered like a glass that had been dropped on the floor.

But Apophis was a red herring. It wasn't the asteroid itself that we should have feared. What the scientists should have been worried about was the aftermath of the impact – what came to be known as the Frost. When Apophis exploded, the atmosphere absorbed immeasurable amounts of meteoric dust. The debris in the atmosphere joined the already high levels of man-made carbon monoxide. This, along with a slight wobble in the Earth's orbit caused by Apophis's collision, created the perfect storm to trigger something that hadn't happened in about 12,500 years – an Ice Age.

Technically it wasn't an Ice Age; what we were experiencing was an Impact Winter or a Glacial Period, a cooler period within an Ice Age. But that was just semantics. Our reality was a vicious cycle – the more the temperatures dropped, the more ice and snow covered the earth, and the more the sun's rays were reflected back, making it even colder.