  The Earth-stopping effect plays a crucial role in the direct detection of
sub-GeV dark matter. Besides the elastic scattering process, the quasi-elastic
and deep inelastic scatterings between dark matter and nucleus that are usually
neglected can dominate the interaction, especially in the accelerated dark
matter scenarios, which may affect the dark matter detection sensitivity
significantly for the underground experiments. We calculate such inelastic
scattering contributions in the Earth-stopping effect and illustrate the
essence of our argument with the atmospheric dark matter. With the available
data, we find that the resulting upper limits on the atmospheric dark
matter-nucleus scattering cross-section can differ from those only considering
the elastic scattering process by one order of magnitude.
