The potential of climate collapse to bring about social disruption and widespread extinction isn’t like the single-impact event depicted by an asteroid collision with Earth in the satirical film Don’t Look Up. A better metaphor is that the planet is hurtling into the path of a field of space debris. The deeper the planet gets into the cloud, the more it will have meteors hitting the atmosphere and hurtling towards the ground like firebombs.

Each meteor will have its own impact site, each its own blast radius. Unlike the asteroid, scientists can’t predict exactly when each space bomb will hit, where it will land, or what the detonation zone will be.

Earth is already spinning into the path these space rocks. Day Zero, when Cape Town nearly ran out of municipal water, was a meteor strike. The devastation to the Mozambican city of Beira, which lost 90 percent of its infrastructure to Cyclone Idai in 2019, was another meteor strike. The 2016/17 southern African droughts. Australia’s Black Summer fires in 2020, and the three billion animals believed to be burned alive or killed in the wake of the fires, was another meteor strike.

All the fires and floods and heatwaves and droughts — some days-long events, some spanning years — are all meteor strikes, each with their own localised devastation. Many of these events in the Global South go unreported, existing in the negative spaces left in between the headline events of the Global North-dominated news headlines.