Talk:Dunes/@comment-68.42.118.52-20170519031717

Judging by the size of both the crater and the fragment, we can assume this was an asteroid.

For comparison, the asteroid that caused the K-Pg Extinction 66 million years ago was about 6 miles/10 kilometers wide and slammed into the Gulf of Mexico at 30 kilometers per second off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, which has an average depth of between 100-250 meters. That's shallow water in oceanic terms especially compared to the 400-meter depth of the Dunes.

So what does this say about the Dunes Crater? Well, for one thing, this asteroid was nowhere NEAR the size of the K-Pg Asteroid.

If you notice, the crater is a deep and near-perfect circle. This type of formation never happens with ocean impacts since the ocean disperses much of the energy needed to make such a deep circular crater. Oceanic craters are very flat and ring-shaped as opposed to the deep pit-like craters caused by land-based impacts. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Meteorcrater.jpg

The aforementioned K-Pg Asteroid crater, if it were still visible today, would be an oceanic crater. http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/images/gg_60212W_Crater.jpg?itok=U5HowQh7

This concludes two things about the Subnautica Asteroid... It was likely made of an extremely dense material such as iridium and osmium that allowed it to survive atmospheric reentry AND impact. It was going at an unfathomably high speed, probably 2-5 times faster than the K-Pg Asteroid, and at a nearly straight angle that it was able to disperse enough water to impact the ground. I say "nearly straight" because if it landed at an angle at that speed, it would've left a parting trail like the Aurora did in the Crash Zone.