In Popular Culture
Impact winters (along with nuclear and volcanic winters) are often the subject of science fiction novels and short stories.
In the episode "Impact Winter" of the popular television show The West Wing, NASA sights a large asteroid that could possibly collide with Earth. President Bartlet recounts the worst case scenario, saying "If the asteroid hits, a shower of burning rock rains down on those woods and starts a fire that burns, that shrouds the hemisphere in a blanket of soot and ash that blocks out the sun for weeks. 'Impact winter', they call it."
The Doctor Who audio drama Blood of the Daleks is set on a human colony world which has suffered an asteroid strike and is undergoing an impact winter.
The premise of the video game Midwinter revolves around the entire planet being covered in snow after a meteorite strike, resulting in an impact winter.
In Chrono Trigger, the impact of Lavos in 65,000,000 BC caused an impact winter that apparently lasted for millions of years.
Read more about this topic: Impact Winter
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)