Earth has experienced many shocks, including a rock four times the size of Mount Everest crashing into the planet 3.26 billion years ago. Scientists believe it was much larger than the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, known as Kickslub. .it may have landed in the ocean where the Earth had not yet begun to form continents.
According to a report published by the Washington Post website, the impact was so violent that it boiled the upper layer of the ocean and generated a tsunami at the impact site that reached a skyscraper height in New York. Molten rocks fell from the sky. , and the atmosphere was filled with ash and dust as darkness enveloped the planet.
Three researchers at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this month concluded that Earth was hit by giant space rocks that provided the planet with iron and bacteria, making the planet more suitable for human life. A major influence in paving the way for life on Earth's surface.
Ambiguity
The early years of Earth's history remain a mystery. No one knows how life evolved into the most complex organisms during this tumultuous time, and many researchers are interested in the story of how the planet became habitable.
Our solar system has numerous examples of unstable planets and moons, and Earth is an exception, teeming with life.
Giant impacts are becoming more important as researchers delve into the distant past, and according to Harvard senior geologist Nadia Traban, who presented her research at the Geophysical Union meeting, “These giant impacts certainly have a negative impact on the atmosphere. “If you put a lot of dust in the atmosphere, it gets very dark, and you You boil a lot of sea water. “At the same time, these negative effects did not last long, and in their wake, conditions improved. Support life, at least for a period of time.”
For example, a massive tsunami caused by an impact 3.26 billion years ago mixed up the water column in the world's oceans and brought iron, a key metabolic nutrient, into the shallow oceans, possibly cementing iron next, according to Tropon. Debris from other planets is the reason oceans don't dominate Earth.
Nick Wogan, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, described how the first impacts may have given Earth a “hot, steamy atmosphere” but also stimulated the chemistry suitable for life.
positive conflicts
Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist at the Southern Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, explained at the Geophysical Union meeting: “The first impacts could have favored proto-life in many ways, perhaps introduced it. For example, major elements or molecules.” “Missed from the nearby surface and may have been important for early life.”
According to research, Earth was a watery world. Life was rare and primitive, and nothing like animals appeared until then. Scientists researching the chemistry of the early atmosphere do not know whether the early sky was blue or orange.
John Tartuno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester, said: “Maybe there was some orange haze like Los Angeles in the 1980s. You can think of a young Earth as an alien planet in its structure. It was. A planet under attack from the day it was born. The Earth stood still.” The young woman endured a series of blows for hundreds of millions of years, including a collision with a Mars-sized object that led to the formation of the Moon. These collisions are an essential part of the planet's history. They helped shape the Earth itself, gradually adding mass to it. The future is vulnerable to catastrophic conflicts.
Scientists have dubbed the 3.26 billion-year-old event “S2,” one of 16 major impacts identified by scientists between 3.5 billion and 2.4 billion years ago, according to Simone Marchi.
He said: “These events don't leave craters, but scientists can see their signatures in thin layers of sedimentary rock.” The “S” in “S2” stands for spheroids, small glass droplets that rained down from the sky after the impact. “These spherules and other debris from the impact form a unique layer in the sedimentary rock that contains the description of the moment, like fingerprints that a policeman can find.”
Big move
In the early days, there wasn't much to kill. The big leap in evolution came with the development of bacteria, which some scientists believe came with collisions from outer space and were behind pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. Later, organisms appeared. Using this oxygen as fuel for its main functions, life did not become multicellular until the last billion years, and the first organisms we can call animals appeared 600 million years ago.
Could the existence of life on Earth and the diversity of its beautiful forms have occurred without early influences? No one can say. When these impacts occurred, there were no people around, no dinosaurs, or even jellyfish – there were only bacteria, and it's hard to know all those secrets from those protozoans.
But microbes and their benefit from catastrophes gave life a head start, and were able to survive harsh conditions and high temperatures in order to heal the planet. Margie says about this: “In those times, life was mainly composed. Very simple creatures, that's why they managed to survive, and if humans had existed at that time, we might have gone extinct.”
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