On January 28, 2027, the Observatory of the Côte d’Azur in France reported that an unnamed meteor struck asteroid 433 Eros in orbit around Mars. The impact tore free a significant portion of 433 Eros, and scientists projected its debris path to come perilously close to the Moon. When predictions indicated a potential impact with Earth in the Middle East, Iran launched a missile that same year, a countermeasure to break up the debris. Despite its successful launch, the Verethragna failed to intercept the meteor; its engines had ceased operating in orbit.
The broken portion of Eros 433 entered the Moon’s gravitational pull on March 3, 2027. Before breaking free, it altered the Moon’s orbit. Gravitational exertion increased, affecting the centrifugal force that balances the Earth’s oceans. Waves of volcanic activity began across the planet, followed by a shift in global tides that devastated populated coastlines. These weather changes deepened established political unrest in China and the United States, and by summer’s end, killed millions throughout the planet’s island nations.
The acting President of the United States instituted the Population Relocation Initiative, which authorized the military seizure of privately owned bunkers and survival compounds. At the same time, China closed its borders after the Asian coasts became inundated and refugees swarmed north.
Meanwhile, the Eurozone discovered a privately funded project building a massive wall around the highest peaks in the Ural Mountains. They publicly denounced the project, and exposing it led Nordic refugees to migrate to the Urals. This led to hundreds of thousands camping around walls too high to scale; those who attempted to climb them were shot down by gunmen patrolling the walls.
On January 2, 2028, the broken portion of Eros 433 struck the Arabian Sea off the coasts of Oman, Iran, and Pakistan. The impact diameter measured 2.2 miles and delivered an estimated energy equivalent of 55 teratons of TNT.
Mega tsunamis crawled over the Indian Ocean, followed by clouds of superheated dust, ash, and steam. Glaciers within Pakistan melted, inundating southwestern Asia and drowning millions. The impactor burrowed underground, ejecting excavated material into the atmosphere that heated to incandescence upon re-entry, broiling the Earth’s surface hundreds of miles around the impact site. Massive wildfires resulted from this catastrophe, destroying forests and jungles throughout coastal India and Africa.
Unstable conditions caused by planet-wide vulcanism deeply affected global air quality. Germany, Austria, Benelux, and France faced flooding from melting Alpine glaciers, while tidal flooding in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea forced mass relocations north. As the deluge overtook the Mediterranean’s northeastern coasts, refugees from the Balkans and Italy collided with Northern Europeans fleeing southward. Deadly riots ensued when scientists declared that Switzerland would become an island.
Meanwhile, officials controlling the Ural Wall project airlifted select citizens from Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine behind their walled territory. Those guarding the Wall massacred thousands of Nordic refugees seeking safety from rising waters.
Iceland evacuated its population to cruise ships after volcanic eruptions and flooding engulfed its habitable land. Lowland Ireland and parts of the United Kingdom, already below sea level, experienced immediate, catastrophic flooding.
World media broadcasters estimated 500 million dead or missing by early autumn.
Volcanism intensified in the Arctic Ocean, blast-warming the northern polar region. Permafrost in northern Canada thawed, creating landslides and swelling inland channels. Immense tides drowned cities throughout the United States, but by late November, over 8.3 million people had relocated safely inland, making the most prominent survivor population part of the US Relocation Initiative.
By late winter 2028, the sudden release of carbon dioxide from the destruction of carbonate rocks during the impact triggered an immediate greenhouse effect that melted the remaining ice caps in the polar north and began thawing the West Antarctic ice sheet.
In the following decades, bolide dust and molten particles polluted the Earth’s atmosphere. The Moon’s unstable orbit agitated the Earth’s subducting slabs, culminating in the eruption of a long-dormant super volcano in North America in 2031.
FEMITOKON 