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The paper also mentions that, at the time, "dinosaur killer"-sized objects hit the Earth every 15 million years on average, which must have been sort of disruptive.
Likely due to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment
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> Drabon and her colleagues went in search of evidence of ancient major impacts in a remote area south of Kruger National Park in South Africa. There they sought out rocky outcrops containing a layer of spherules – molten droplets formed following a major meteorite impact that rained down over huge swathes of the planet. There are eight such spherule bands in this area, each preserving an ancient impact event. > Whil…
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The value of HN is when people-who-know help curious folks understand the validity of a story. Surely someone here is more capable of assessing this story and I agree that skepticism is in order at first.
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The downvotes are misplaced. This is a good question. The value of HN is when people-who-know help curious folks understand the validity of a story. Surely someone here is more capable of assessing this story and I agree that skepticism is in order at first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Drabon and her colleagues went in search of evidence of ancient major impacts in a remote area south of Kruger National Park in South Africa. There they sought out rocky outcrops containing a layer of spherules – molten droplets formed following a major meteorite impact that rained down over huge swathes of the planet. There are eight such spherule bands in this area, each preserving an ancient impact event. > Whil…
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What do you feel is missing? You might find that if you read the paper, it goes through the evidence, prior evidence, and their hypothesis.
When is the next one coming? Or what is the probability distributuon like?
I love this type of articles where we can reconstruct what happened so long ago just based on careful observations. Some other instances I've come across: * The K-Pg extinction event that wiped off dinosaurs had the impact it did because the asteroid happened to impact a shallow water region. This kicked up a lot of sulfur (in gypsum) that further affected global climate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crate…
Me too! My book is filled with them. Like how minerals in lava, affected by Earth's magnetic field, lock into place while cooling, which provides us with yet another cross-check for radiometric dating. See page 23: