Professor Claims Dante's "Inferno" Offers "Accurate" Depiction of Asteroid Impact

Last week, a professor of English claimed that Satan’s fall to Earth in Dante’s Inferno was an accurate description of a meteor strike on the planet. Timothy Burbery of Marshall University made the claim that Dante engaged in a thought experiment in impact physics to the European Geosciences Union General Assembly on Friday, where he claimed that Dante provided a description of the impact crater created by a meteor impact and the resulting shock waves that anticipated modern scientific understanding of “modern meteorics,” including non-Euclidean mathematical modeling.

​According to an EGU press release promoting the event:

Burbery proposes that Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunnelling to the Earth’s centre. This impact forces the Northern Hemisphere to retreat, which, consequently, forms the core of Hell as a bottom-up crater, while the earth displaced behind Satan creates the mountain of Purgatory as a central peak.

​Burbery proposed that we should consider Satan “as an oblong, asteroid-sized body, reminiscent of the interstellar object Oumuamua” before making an incredible claim:

In this light, the nine circles of Hell are no longer merely symbolic tiers of sin, but rather a remarkably accurate description of the concentric, terraced morphology found in multi-ring impact basins across the solar system, from the Moon to Venus. Anticipating the non-Euclidean geometry later found in the Paradiso, Dante intuitively mapped the physics of terminal velocity and crustal breach required for a massive object to reach maximum compression at the Earth’s core.

This claim is, to put it mildly, insane.
 
At the level of physics, for an object to be large enough and moving fast enough to penetrate to the Earth’s core, it would release enough energy to basically destroy the entire planet. You would not simply create an open cavity and have shockwaves travel around the world, nor would the mountain of Paradise emerge on the other side.
 
While it is true that in the initial moments, a cavity would form, followed by shock waves, afterward, the liquid core material would splash upward, the crust would be destabilized or even stripped and sent into space, and the cavity itself would collapse under the force of gravity. The atmosphere would likely be blown off, the oceans boiled away, and the planet would become a molten ball being reshaped around the impact.
 
This is not what Dante described.
 
In fact, Dante doesn’t really describe the fall of Satan much at all in the Inferno. At the end of the poem, in Canto XXXIV, he reaches the bottom of Hell, Dis, where Satan is trapped in ice.
 
As Dante notes, Satan is not an oblong rock like an interstellar object but is instead person-shaped, with three faces on one head sitting above well-defined shoulders. He also had two large bat-wings, which flapped. This alone should refute any claim that he was an oblong meteor.
 
Dante’s description of Satan’s impact upon hitting the Earth is also too brief and poetic to support such broad claims that it represents a scientific thought experiment into impact physics:

He fell on this side out of Heaven; whereat,
the land, which hitherto was spread out here,
through fear of him made of the sea a veil,
and came into our hemisphere; perhaps
to flee from him, what is on this side seen
left the place empty here, and upward rushed.
     (trans. Courtney Langdon)

Here, Dante describes Satan hitting the Earth, causing the other side of the planet to bulge out, becoming the mountain of Purgatory. But Dante also explains (34.110-111) that the Satan is positioned at the very center of the Earth, and none of this has anything to do with earth science or physics as we know it. Not only is the center of the earth not a cave of ice housing a fallen angel, but hitting one side of the planet does not cause the other side to form a mountain—a giant mountain that does not exist in reality.
 
In Dante, Hell is a hollow cone pointing down into the earth, a mirror of the cone of the mountain of Purgatory pushed out the other side. Neither is shaped like an asteroid crater, which tends to be flat, not pointed, at the bottom and does not typically taper.
 
It's also worth noting that the asteroid Burbery compares Satan to, the one that killed the dinosaurs, did not come to rest fixed in the Earth as Satan is, but was vaporized on impact. Similarly, the nine circles of hell are quite clearly not an impact crater like those seen on Mars or the Moon since these craters are on the surface of heavenly bodies, or even the earth, not buried deep beneath the surface.
 
In short, I don’t see any support in the Inferno for Burbery’s conclusions. They only make sense if you add a great deal to the poem—like an oblong, rounded Satan—that isn’t there but is designed to create a “geomyth” out of a straightforwardly symbolic medieval cosmology.