I did the math: How fucked would we be if what happened in the cinematic happened on Earth?


So, for the math, I'll be using this video for the ending cinematic.The first, and easiest thing, to figure out is how fast the sword is moving. Let's say that it acts similar to a meteor in terms of when the entry burn up begins. This typically begins at 80km-120km above the surface of the Earth. For the sake of the next few calculations, let's say it begins at 120km, as the burn up begins higher up for larger objects. The burn up begins at 1:57 in the video, and the sword impacts the surface at 2:01. This means that the sword traveled 120km in 4 seconds. This then means that the sword was traveling at 30km/s, or 30000m/s, or 1800km/hr, or about 1120 mph.Next, we need to figure out the dimensions of the sword. This is a bit harder. I'm going to use this video to estimate the length of the sword, and then the width will follow. From the initial jump at 9 seconds, it takes the player until 57 seconds to pass the pointed part of the hilt on the blade (I know there's a technical term for this, but I'm not a swordsmith). Now, the terminal velocity for an upright human in free fall on Earth is roughly 60 m/s. I'm not sure what it is for an upright panda, but we're going to use humans. Assuming an acceleration due to gravity of 9.8 m/s2, the player reached terminal velocity in roughly six seconds. During this time, they covered 29.4 meters, given by the formula: d=1/2at. After the player reached terminal velocity, they were still in free fall for 44 seconds until they reached our inspection point, meaning that during this time they traveled 2640 meters. Adding this together, we get to a total distance of 2669.4 meters. Rounding will give us a final number of 2670 meters. Going from a frame in the cinematic, one can tell that this distance is roughly 1/4 the length of the full sword, meaning that the full sword is 10680 meters long. The sword is also about 2/3 as broad as this measurement, giving us 1780 meters in breadth. There's no real way to scale the width in the cinematic, but judging by the map, the width is roughly 2/3 the breadth, giving us 1190 meters in width. For the sake of calculations, we're going to assume a rectangular prism, meaning that the sword is about 22,622,376,000 cubic meters.Now that we have the dimensions, we need the mass. I'm going to assume that it's steel, because the only other thing it could possibly be that I can find a density for is Adamantium, but that doesn't really exist in the Warcraft universe... Or our universe. So, steel is 7700 kg/m3. Multiply that by our volume, and we have a whopping 1.74*1014 kg (or, 174 billion kilograms, or 174 trillion grams). For reference, Saturn's 9th largest moon, Prometheus, is just shy of this mass.So, how fucked would we be? Well, let's compare it to a mass extinction that everyone knows about: The Chicxulub impact that killed the dinosaurs, and 75% of all life on Earth. Well, this sword is only a single order of magnitude lighter than that meteor (source). This sword would have impacted Azeroth with about 7.83*1022 joules of energy, so, still a bit less than the meteor, this time by two orders of magnitude. This is about the same amount of energy released by a magnitude 9.5 earthquake.So, what would the aftermath of just the impact be? Well, for one, the skies all across the planet would darken, choking out most life on Azeroth. Since this was close to the coast, let's use the example of the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, which was recorded as a 9.3-9.6 magnitude. One could expect tsunamis in excess of 10m, reaching all the way to the next coast. Settlements within the 400,000km2 area around the epicenter were wiped out. This doesn't even take into account the plate tectonics of Azeroth, which more than likely has plates similar to the Earth, and this was very close to a possible fault line, potentially triggering a second massive earthquake. These two could potentially wipe out settlements on Kalimdor from their initial impacts. The Eastern Kingdoms will also feel a heavy impact, especially The Swamp of Sorrows, The Blasted Lands, and the Twilight Highlands, as they have no mountain ranges to protect them from the incoming tsunamis. All of these zones will by wiped out almost completely.As for the lasting affects to the orbit of the planet. If Azeroth is the same mass as the Earth, then we actually didn't gain all that much mass. Not even a .0000001% increase. We actually gained about .00000000002% of our mass.So, in other words, we're all fucking dead, but our orbit is fine, if anything, we drifted by a few seconds per year.