Second Impact

Adam's "Wings of Light" extending into the stratosphere over the South Pole, scattering disembodied souls

Second Impact is a global cataclysm which occurred on September 13th, 2000, when a massive explosion occurred in Antarctica which melted the polar cap and even altered Earth's axis. The explosion resulted in massive tsunamis, followed by a dramatic increase in global sea levels which flooded most coastal cities, and caused a catastrophic shift in global weather patterns.

Cataclysm

According to the official report on the disaster by the United Nations, the massive explosion was the result of a meteorite impact. Hence the event was dubbed "Second Impact" (as opposed to the "First Impact", the theorized massive meteorite collision 4 billion years ago that created the Moon). The meteorite was supposedly too small to detect but was traveling at near the speed of light, resulting in it striking with tremendous force despite its size.

Two billion people the southern hemisphere were instantly killed by the gargantuan tsunamis which followed the explosion. Many more would die in world wide coastal flooding. As a result of the subsequent chaos, global wars soon broke out due to food and resource shortages and refugee crises. Civil wars and ethnic conflicts were also widespread. Two days after the disaster, a nuclear exchange broke out between India and Pakistan over refugee tensions. On September 20th, seven days after Second Impact, a nuclear bomb was detonated in Old Tokyo, killing half a million people. Fighting spread across the world, and only ended on February 14th, 2001 when the Valentine Treaty formally put an end to the fighting. By the end of these events, the global human population was halved. Thousands of plant and animal species had also been rendered extinct.

The aftermath of Second Impact, and the official cover-story

Aftermath

However, in a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of humanity and Man's mastery of science and technology, Second Impact was not the end of human civilization. Instead, the nations of the world struggled to rebuild from the disaster, ensuing environmental and economic collapse, and civil wars. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, within 15 years human civilization more or less recovered from the cataclysm of Second Impact. Remarkably, by the 2010's a vapid consumerist society with rampant conspicuous consumption has re-asserted itself. Those that survived are trying to move on with their lives, but while humans were able to physically rebuild pre-Second Impact society, many are still left in the back of their minds with the lingering emotional and psychological scars of the chaos brought about by the disaster, and are left "going through the motions" of a return to normalcy.

Hidden Agenda

Known only to a select few was that the meteorite impact story was simply a cover up: the true cause of Second Impact was when the First Angel, Adam, exploded as the result of a "Contact Experiment" carried out by the Katsuragi Expedition, which was itself secretly backed by the mysterious Seele organization.

Seele intentionally initiated Second Impact, knowing exactly what would happen, in order to "minimize the damage" of pursuing their ultimate goal of carrying out the forbidden union of Adam and Lilith, elevating themselves to godhood in the process. Had Seele simply tried to fuse Lilith with Adam as soon as they woke Adam from dormancy, they couldn't have controlled the process. Instead, they used the Spear of Longinus to reduce Adam to a controllable, embryonic state - knowing that incidentally, this would result in a cataclysmic explosion which would kill billions of people. After Adam was reduced to an embryonic state, Adam could be united with Lilith in a version of "Third Impact" under Seele's control. However, during the brief time Adam was awakened in Antarctica, it was able to spread the embryos or "seeds" of its progeny, the Angels. The Angels could hamper any attempt to initiate the Instrumentality process. At the same time, the Angels would try to carry out their own version of "Third Impact" which involved reuniting with Adam to reactivate it from its embryonic state, at which point Adam could spread a worldwide Anti A.T. Field to eliminate all human life, removing the Angels' evolutionary competitor for mastery of the planet. What Adam did in Antarctica, briefly spreading an Anti A.T. Field which eliminated all Lilith-based life down to bacteria, is a microcosm of what would have happened on a global scale if Adam had been fully reactivated. Thus, Seele backed Gehirn and later Nerv to construct the Evangelions using Adam's cloned genetic material, to defeat the Angels so they could carry out their own version of Third Impact.

Notes

• Second Impact is stated to have directly killed two billion people with massive tsunamis, and when this figure was combined with deaths from the ensuing chaos of rising sea leves/climate change, refugee crises, economic collapse, war, etc., the human population of Earth was "halved". Given that the world population was roughly 6 billion in the year 2000, that would mean that an additional one billion humans were killed indirectly due to the chaos of Second Impact's aftermath.
• The size and speed of the meteor which supposedly struck Earth according to the UN's official cover story, resulting in Second Impact, varies between different sources within the show itself. In Death & Rebirth, it is mentioned to be a massive meteor at ten percent the speed of light, while in the textbook page flashed in Episode 07, it is supposed to be a very small meteor moving at speeds varying between ninety to ninety-nine percent that of light.