It was 200 times bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs nearly three billion years later.
A huge meteorite first discovered in 2014 caused a tsunami bigger than any in known human history and boiled the oceans, scientists have discovered.
The team also found evidence that massive asteroid impacts did not bring only destruction to Earth - they helped early life thrive. The meteorite S2 was much larger than the space rock we are most familiar with. The one that led to the dinosaurs’ extinction 66 million years ago was about 10km wide, or almost the height of Mount Everest.It struck when Earth was still in its early years and looked very different. It was a water world with just a few continents sticking out of the sea. Life was very simple - microorganisms composed of single cells.
Rangers accompanied them with machine guns to protect them against wild animals like elephants or rhinos, or even poachers in the national park. “Imagine a rain cloud, but instead of water droplets coming down, it's like molten rock droplets raining out of the sky,” says Prof Drabon.The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami would have paled in comparison, suggests Prof Drabon.
But what Prof Drabon and her team found next was surprising. The rock evidence showed that the violent disturbances churned up nutrients like phosphorus and iron that fed simple organisms.“It’s like when you brush your teeth in the morning. It kills 99.9% of bacteria, but by the evening they're all back, right?” she says.
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