Great Comet of 1878 (Starfall)

The Great Comet of 1874 (also referred to as Secchi's Comet, Comet Pius, and occasionally Wormwood) was a large comet that impacted Earth on the morning of March 20, 1878 in the shallow ocean north of island of Ishigaki, 135 kilometres off the east coast of Taiwan (Formosa).

Originally 'discovered' over a month before it's collision in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere, it's nucleus prior to impact being estimated at being 6.56 kilometres in diameter before it ultimately struck the planet at a speed of around 18 kilometres per second (64,800 kilometres per hour, or almost 60 times the speed of sound). Descending over the northern hemisphere, it impacted in the shallow ocean north of Ishigaki island (only 290 kilometres from the Chinese mainland), creating a fireball 100 kilometres in diameter, killing millions of men, women and children in a matter of minutes and leaving a complex crater 67.2 kilometres in diameter and over 1 kilometre deep.

The devastation caused in the immediate aftermath of the impact, as well as the effects that lingered on following the collision left it the most devastating natural disaster in recorded history. With the Great Firestorm and Century Without Summer a direct result of impact, the human population faced an acute fifty year decline due to freezing temperatures, famine and acidic rain brought on by the comet, over a billion men, women and children ultimately losing their lives during this period. Furthermore, tens-of-thousand (sometimes placed in the hundreds-of-thousands) of species of plant and animal died out following the 'mass extinction', with millions more facing population bottlenecks as rapid population decline affected the entire planet for decades and centuries after the event.