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Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchean environment and life

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6 days agoby kristianp

The paper is at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408721121. We've adopted its title above.

6 days agoby dang

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_crater#Effects

* Earth likely had rings ~466M years ago. We deduced this by looking at impact craters from that time period, and seeing that they all lie near the equator (accounting for continental drift): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...

* Earth's rotation period was probably frozen at 21h, ~600M years ago, likely due to interaction between lunar and solar tides. This resonance could have been broken by ice ages (!!!). Amazing to think that global climate affects earth's rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Resonant_st...

6 days agoby kevinkeller

The article perpetuates the widespread misconception that dinosaurs are extinct. In reality, (some) dinosaurs survived and evolved into modern birds. Everything from penguins to ostriches, hummingbirds to albatrosses and woodpeckers to eagles is a dinosaur.

Science communication should do better and clear up this misunderstanding.

It would be so much cooler to say that the asteroid killed the pterosaurs. Not only is it factually correct, it also opens doors to more curiosity. Why do they say pterosaurs instead of dinosaurs? Turns out they are separate clades. The pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs are all extinct as best as we can tell. The dinosaurs are not.

6 days agoby Timwi

Vote for Giant Meteor 2028!

https://votegiantmeteor.com/

6 days agoby 1970-01-01

When is the next one coming? Or what is the probability distributuon like?

6 days agoby hehehheh

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.

6 days agoby jeffbee