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If a 0.6-mile-wide asteroid were to strike the Earth at the right spot, the world could fall into a mini-ice age, a new study claims.

Opposed to an ocean impact, if an asteroid of that size were to make its impact on land it would cause , which is about the equivalent to the ice ages, according to Space.com.

“These would not be pleasant times," Charles Bardeen, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said during a December presentation at the American Geophysical Union meeting.

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The impact of a , clogging the atmosphere with large amounts of dust. If the asteroid struck somewhere outside an area like a desert with small amounts of vegetation, the impact would ignite multiple wildfires, sending soot into the protective ozone, says the Apex Tribune.

The dust and soot that would fill the atmosphere would reduce the amount of sunlight to reach the surface by 20 percent for the first two years and lead to a drop in precipitation of about 50 percent.

"This is due to the lost heating and the lost temperature, so we lose convection; we don't have as many [weather] fronts," Bardeen said.

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Unfortunately, the effects from the collision wouldn’t be short term, either, lasting up to 10 years.

However, it would take an asteroid almost 10 times bigger than that to cause a catastrophic situation. The one that was thought to wipe out the dinosaurs was about 6 miles wide.

Thankfully, NASA is . Only 1,607 of those 13,000 are considered as “potentially hazardous” and only 879 of those are at least 0.6 miles wide, says NASA’s Near Earth Object Program.

In other words, this ice age asteroid won't be catching us off guard any time soon.

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An astronaut captured this photograph of Utah’s Green River doubling back on itself—a feature known as Bowknot Bend—from the International Space Station on January 22, 2014. (NASA)