Second Impact

"The story presented to the public was just a cover-up." The neutrality and accuracy of the article is disputed. It should be cleaned up to present unbiased information. Please discuss this issue, or begin editing the page.

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. First Impact was actually caused by Lilith's arrival on Earth.). 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 in 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. Within 15 years human civilization more or less recovered from the cataclysm of Second Impact. 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 (possibly from the Dead Sea Scrolls) what would happen, because the damage would be more limited than that caused by a fully awakened Adam (the destruction of all Lilin life down to the bacterial level).Thus they used the Spear of Longinus to reduce Adam to a controllable, embryonic state - knowing that this would result in a cataclysm which would cost billions of lives. Reducing Adam to an embryonic state made it more easy to conceal and protect it from the Angels, whom Seele knew from the Dead Sea Scrolls, would be appearing in about fifteen years.
Some, at least, of the Angels would try to carry out their own version of "Third Impact" which involved reuniting with Adam to reactivate it, 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 then 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 levels/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. The "Second Impact" movie that Shinji watches in Episode 04 combines the two; it is a very small meteor moving at "over ten percent" of the speed of light. Though note that even though the speeds are contradictory, the sizes aren't neccessarily so. A meteor very small in diameter could still be quite "massive" if it were made out of some very dense material, akin to a black hole for instance. In any case the subject is moot as the meteor story is a fabrication.