back to article Ancient Earth asteroid strike that dwarfed dinosaur killer still felt today

Scientists say they have reconstructed an asteroid impact on Earth that was at least three times as massive as the strike that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and the new monster had effects that are still being felt today. Asteroid impact A massive headache for Earth (click to enlarge) The research, published …

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  1. Martin Budden Silver badge

    So, where was the impact site?

    The abstract does say that they studied spherule beds and fractures in the Barberton greenstone belt in South Africa, which suggests that the the impact was nearby(ish): probably "several crater diameters from the impact site". Do they know where?

    1. Grikath

      Re: So, where was the impact site?

      Well.... between plate tectonics and erosion we may well never know where exactly it hit.

      Using Google Maps, there's an area the size of Swaziland to the northwest that looks like it's been hit really hard by something, and would be at about the right distance, but looks can be deceiving, and there may well be no trace of the original crater left.

      It probably isn't Vredefort, since that one is "only" 2-and a bit billion years old.

    2. James Micallef Silver badge

      Re: So, where was the impact site?

      Well, it's more than 3 billion years ago so most the impact site would probably have subducted. There are very few surface rocks on the Earth that are 3 bln + years old.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks

      1. Scroticus Canis
        Pint

        Re: So, where was the impact site?

        Barberton is a few hundred klicks east of Pretoria, so would be around there. A hundred or so klicks west of Pretoria is where most of the platinum mines are and their metals came from a meteor strike as well; that rock though probably broke up as there are scattered deposits of PGMs up to Zimbobwe land. Might have been part of this bad boy though.

        Doubtful that any subduction took place around this part of South Africa as it's underlaid with kratons (or cratons for the new spelling) which don't subduct being several hundred klicks deep into the mantle and are part of the original crust not the johnny-come-lately sedimentary stuff.

        Is it beer time already?

        1. Fibbles

          Re: So, where was the impact site?

          Klicks? Just man up and admit you're using metric. The word is kilometre.

  2. btrower

    Fascinating

    I find this stuff evilly amusing for some reason. It is spectacular!

    It is weird that we are spending so much money on the bogus war on terror and attempting to change the climate when something like this actually poses a realistic threat. The only reason there is not a huge concern about such an event is because people are bad with figures.

    The thing that caused this was big, but not big enough to see at a great distance. A similar thing could be on its way right now. We have a good probability of seeing a pretty spectacular collision at any time; not enough to wipe out life but surely enough to send a nasty earthquake and tsunami. If a rock a few meters wide hit dead-center in New York you would hear about it.

    We have known of this danger for a long time. We spend more searching the skies these days than we used to but in my opinion it is not nearly enough. We should be looking as deep into as much sky as we can to get early warning and we should be working on some type of strategy to avoid species extinction if we can't dodge a big one.

    Would it kill us to take ten percent of the money spent chasing the fictional Climate Change bogeyman and/or the near mythical terrorist danger or perhaps the perfectly insane military budgets and spend it on something that is actually are genuine threat of global proportions? It may well kill us not to.

    1. LaeMing
      Unhappy

      Re: Fascinating

      You are joking right. A full-on sky survey would cost more per year than the anual maintenance of two high-end fighter planes.

      ...

      Um....

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Fascinating

        Once you've found your space rocks, what exactly do you do to stop them? (Hint, right now there's nothing in the bag of tricks to do that)

        1. Lapun Mankimasta

          Re: Fascinating

          The plan I would adopt would be to buy up a few Soyuz chasses, a few thermionuclear powerplants, and a few medium-powered lasers (ideally I'd get some of the USASF high-powered lasers they were talking of putting into their fighter jets, but that's so unlikely - saving the world from asteroids doesn't rank compared with wasting the US taxpayers' money) and talk NASA into letting me run on their worldwide network. I'd say with a three-orbit lead, I could bring an asteroid posing danger to the Earth, into an orbit (Lagrange 5 would be best) where it would be at danger from Earth rather than the reverse - I'd sell whatever I could mine from them just to recoup my costs.

          You see, with one Soyuz-plus-laser installation ahead of the asteroid, I could slow it down and change its orbit coming out the inner system; with one Soyuz-plus-laser installation behind the asteroid I could speed it up and change its orbit coming into the inner system. And with a three orbit lead on the impact time, I'd have sufficient time to do it in.

          Some people have no imaginations.

          1. VinceH

            Re: Fascinating

            " and a few medium-powered lasers"

            Don't forget the frickin' sharks on which to mount them.

            You'd have to genetically engineer them to live in space.

            Hmm. Genetically engineered space-sharks with lasers mounted on them. What could possibly go wrong?

            1. Florida1920
              Facepalm

              Re: Fascinating

              Genetically engineered space-sharks with lasers mounted on them. What could possibly go wrong?

              You'll need a bigger launch vehicle.

          2. chris lively

            Re: Fascinating

            You forgot the sharks. Those lasers aren't going to swim around themselves you know.

          3. Psyx

            Re: Fascinating

            "The plan I would adopt would be to buy up a few Soyuz chasses, a few thermionuclear powerplants, and a few medium-powered lasers (ideally I'd get some of the USASF high-powered lasers they were talking of putting into their fighter jets,"

            Only one of those things exists in the real world, y'know?

            "You see, with one Soyuz-plus-laser installation ahead of the asteroid, I could slow it down and change its orbit coming out the inner system"

            Let's see the maths. We're back to the 'bad at numbers' things again, where rocks weighing a million tons moving at 20 miles per second can be waved clear by lasering them.

        2. James Micallef Silver badge

          Re: Fascinating

          "Once you've found your space rocks, what exactly do you do to stop them?"

          I think it was right here on el Reg that I saw a cunning plan to paint any incoming asteroids. Apparently the solar wind would thus exert more force on it and divert it out of it's course, if caught far out enough. Not completely sure how serious / plausible it is.

          And if all else fails... how old is Bruce Willis??

    2. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: Fascinating

      Probably time to get a new hat, then.

    3. Bluewhelk
      Mushroom

      Re: Fascinating

      If there was an object this size anywhere close we would have spotted it by now.

      As a comparison the larger moon of Mars is Phobos. This according to Wikipedia (yeah I know) is 27 × 22 × 18 km so is smaller but was discovered back in 1877.

      Also from the Wiki, "Near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs, are asteroids that have orbits that pass close to that of Earth. Asteroids that actually cross the Earth's orbital path are known as Earth-crossers. As of May 2010, 7,075 near-Earth asteroids are known and the number over one kilometre in diameter is estimated to be 500–1,000."

      These are all being tracked and all have (currently) safe orbits.

      I definately take your point about the smaller things though, the Chelyabinsk meteor was around 20m across and stuff like this is very hard to spot, small and VERY dark and non reflecting. One of these in the wrong place would be very inconvenient.

    4. James Micallef Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Fascinating

      Well, all the cameras we need are up there already, we just need to point them AWAY from Earth

    5. Psyx

      Re: Fascinating

      "The only reason there is not a huge concern about such an event is because people are bad with figures."

      Really? I would say the opposite. We are bad with figures, therefore we grossly overestimate the threat. Humans toss the word 'million' around casually without registering how vast it is. We happily turn the stupidly huge into something trite and worry about grossly improbable things, instead of worrying about the far-more-probable.

      Looking at a thousand years of future, we'd be astronomically unlucky to get hit with a rock that big: A millions to one chance, even without the consideration that there were a lot more space rocks floating around our solar system 3 billion years ago.

      The problem then is not us being bad at numbers, but bad at risk assessment. The odds are stupidly long, but it's essentially 'game over' for humanity. We should keep an eye out for big rocks not because of how likely they are (they aren't) but how devastating they will be. That's almost another problem though: they will be so potentially catastrophic that civilisation is likely to be knocked on its ass. Hence: There won't be any economy, hence no profit, hence it's not something large organisations have an active interest in. If everyone will be screwed afterwards and the odds are long, why financially disadvantage in the current timeframe yourself to ward against a threat that won't materialise.

      Poor risk assessment skills and greed are the main issues, not being bad at numbers.

      1. Kane
        Thumb Up

        Re: Fascinating@ Psyx

        "A millions to one chance"

        And we all know that million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

        1. Primus Secundus Tertius

          Re: Fascinating@ Psyx

          Nonsense.

          I've been doing the UK lottery for 20 years - odds 1 in 14,000,000 - and am not yet rich.

          1. VinceH

            Re: Fascinating@ Psyx

            "I've been doing the UK lottery for 20 years - odds 1 in 14,000,000 - and am not yet rich."

            Yes, but that's a fourteen million to one chance (and even that's approximate), not a million to one chance. It's million to one events that happen nine times out of ten.

      2. VinceH

        Re: Fascinating

        "Looking at a thousand years of future, we'd be astronomically unlucky to get hit"

        He said, moments before a lump of rock fell out of the sky and hit him on the bonce.

      3. btrower

        Re: Fascinating

        You misunderstood me. I was saying the exact same thing as you. There is a small probability in your day to day life that you will suddenly die, but you get life insurance if you have a family because as remote (seeming) the chance, the consequences of not having insurance are too severe to bear.

        In terms of probability, I expect it is improbable that a planet killer will strike in my lifetime, but It is not far off even money that a nasty one will.

        The risk is huge. In fact, the risk is entirely unbearable. It would take a hell of an impact to destroy life, but not nearly as severe an impact to destroy civilization and likely our species. There is a finite chance of extinction and it would not be that expensive to give us a chance to at least escape extinction.

        As for the probability that we have an 'event', well ... if it happens the probability is 1. We don't understand what creates the risk well enough to put a good number on it. Our long quiet period may be aberrant and end at any time. My reckoning that the probability of a very bad strike could just be an optimistic hunch.

        We know there are rocks in space and we know that we have been hit by rocks from space and we can be fairly certain we will be hit again. Some of those hits can be very bad. Beyond that we don't know nearly enough to have much confidence in any estimate.

        My point stands that we spend all sorts of money on other things. The marginal final 20 billion dollars of U.S. Military budget probably does less good with the military than it would on a project to get early warning of Armageddon.

        Note: Don't have the military do this. They will spend most of the money figuring out how to weaponize the phenomenon.

        1. NomNomNom

          Re: Fascinating

          It's funny how a million-to-one asteroid strike is a huge danger but the same people will write off climate change as a non-issue.

          Can any of these geniuses prove that climate change has less than one chance in a million of causing a disaster? Of course not.

        2. Psyx

          Re: Fascinating

          "but It is not far off even money that a nasty one will."

          Yes it is. Citation needed.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wiped out species in existence?

    Wasn't this back when the earliest single celled life was believed to begin? There wouldn't have been much to wipe out, and they would have been clustered around smokers in the deep ocean so the impact probably didn't bother them much on a global scale.

    1. Fluffy Bunny

      Re: Wiped out species in existence?

      "earliest single celled life was believed to begin"

      No, that was around 4.5B years ago.

      1. stu 4

        Re: Wiped out species in existence?

        "No, that was around 4.5B years ago."

        eh ?

        no it wasn't. that's the rough age of EARTH! it WAS around 3.6 million years ago.

        which does surely beg the next question... if it was a comet... could it have been the panspermia event ?

        1. Tom 7

          Re: Wiped out species in existence?

          Panspermia requires a small rock that slows quickly so that any life in it is not fried by the fuck off explosion, the shock waves sufficient to destroy some of natures hardest crystals and the following world wide firestorm.

          Well that and a complete lack of perspective.

          1. stu 4

            @Tom 7

            no one know what Panspermia requires.

            3.6B years ago life started on earth. no one knows why.

            3.6B years ago, a massive 'thing' hit earth.

            there is insufficient evidence to conclude Panspermia is not possible in this scenario I would suggest.

            I am not a 'believer'. I am simply stating that your premise is unproven.

            1. Moosh

              Re: @Tom 7

              Maybe the collision simply kicked things into gear for whatever was already starting to develop on earth

              1. Tom 7

                Re: @Tom 7

                The hard thing about life is getting it started. Panspermia merely adds getting off a planet, a few hundred light years of interstellar travel, and landing again without being destroyed to the problem of starting life in the first place. As a theory it laughs in the face of Occams razor and comes out looking like his noodlyness in pico-denier manifestation mode as a result.

                Panspermia has its origins in intellectual laziness and deserves the same respect that making Pi 3 so the really stupid can calculate the wheel sizes for mechanical calculators.

                1. Nigel 11

                  Re: @Tom 7

                  The hard thing about life is getting it started

                  Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it's a virtual inevitability, given a planet continuously covered in liquid water for a few tens or hundreds of millions of years. There's only one instance of life known to us at present, and you cannot calculate anything about the likelyhood of an event from a single datum.

                  However, one can observe that life started within a few hundred million years of the formation of this planet, and closer still to the later time when Earth developed stable oceans that weren't periodically boiled or vaporised. So life got started fairly quickly compared to the length of time it's been running for.

                  The same cannot be said of multicellular life. It may be that almost every planet in a habitable zone around a star is covered in slime, that only one in a million has multicellular organisms, and that we are currently the only intelligent life in our galaxy. But that's also speculation - only one datum, from which it's hard to make deductions about the likelyhood of life of any sort.

                2. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: @Tom 7

                  "Panspermia has its origins in intellectual laziness..."

                  Hmmm. Fred Hoyle... intellectual laziness... not so much.

            2. Trevor 3

              Re: @Tom 7

              Even that .6 of a billion is quite a large number of years.

              Unless they are accurate enough to say "3.6B years ago, on Tuesday" which I doubt, we'll never know either way.

              1. chris lively

                Re: @Tom 7

                It was a Monday, not Tuesday. We all know bad things happen on Monday mornings.

                1. emmanuel goldstein

                  Re: @Tom 7

                  around teatime...

        2. traceyfields
          FAIL

          Re: Wiped out species in existence?

          > no it wasn't. that's the rough age of EARTH! it WAS around 3.6 million years ago.

          stu4,

          let us take another look at the article, shall we?

          "the scientists behind the paper think they have found evidence of a massive impact between 3.23 billion and 3.47 billion years ago"

          that is billion years as in BEEELION years in El Reg terms or maybe even BEEEEEEEEEEEELION years, as that is quite a few billion years and certainly longer than the lifespan of my computer's operating system (which has just suffered an extinction event).

          1. stu 4

            Re: Wiped out species in existence?

            yes sorry, i meant billion obviously.

            my point being - life on earth started 3 6B years ago, not 4.5B (which is the age of the earth).

    2. hplasm
      Joke

      Re: Wiped out species in existence?

      "... they would have been clustered around smokers in the deep ocean..."

      So after the apocalypse, life will begin again outside offices and in shelters outside of pubs.

      1. Psyx

        Re: Wiped out species in existence?

        "So after the apocalypse, life will begin again outside offices and in shelters outside of pubs."

        Certainly that's where civilisation will bootstrap itself.

      2. Grave

        Re: Wiped out species in existence?

        impactor of that size would cause what is known as crustal tsunami. would just crush all underground shelters as it traveled around the globe. what is more interesting however is: without such impact the life as we know it would probably not even exist :)

        1. Nigel 11

          Re: Wiped out species in existence?

          impactor of that size would cause what is known as crustal tsunami. would just crush all underground shelters as it traveled around the globe

          But life at that time was single-celled organisms living in oceans. Provided the water around them didn't vaporise or get hot enough to kill them, they'd survive with no trouble at all. An impact like his could sterilize all life on land and within rocks, but deepwater life away from the impact site would stay safe.

    3. Grikath

      Re: Wiped out species in existence? @ DougS

      Actually the formation they've studied is rather famous for containing microfossils which prove life was already around and thriving 3 point something billion years ago. Certainly *before* that hit, since the microfossils already were present in the then-rock , and were not melted away in the firestorm.

      The article, and the geological description of the rocks elsewhere mention shear ruptures which then were filled up by local melt.. that blast was *hot* ....The fireball would have sterilised the "immediate" surroundings, but the effects on the rest of life on the globe could well have been not as devastating as you'd think. You're talking about a time when continents were *just* beginning to form ( that rock structure is one of the old platelets that survived.), and the earth was basically a large ocean dotted with some landmasses, punctuated by * lots* of volcanism. There also was a hell of a lot more debris hanging around in the solar system, so meteorite strikes were rather common then, even big(gish) ones.

      Life present at the time obviously was able to cope with it, else we would not be around, we're talking about our furthest ancestors, after all. Life at the time would have been, and *must* have been, resilient enough to take a bit of a scalding and a beating. So in the end the impact probably would have seriously inconvenienced local species, but for the rest of the world, it would simply have registered as "a bit more of the hot red stuff, the neighbourhood is really turning into a slum nowadays, don't you think?"

  4. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Fascinating

    This is one of the reasons I visit this site. With that brown-nosing out of the way, I feel I should be That Guy and point out that the Richter scale went out decades ago; it's the Moment Magnitude scale now.

    1. james 68

      Re: Fascinating

      you realise this is The Reg?

      It should be measured in Essex girl knee tremblers.

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Fascinating

        It should be measured in Essex girl knee tremblers.

        We'd need a bigger unit than that.

        1. Big_Boomer Silver badge

          Re: Fascinating

          You've obviously not been to Pitsea. The "units" there are enormovast. Just the idea of them suffering knee tremblers is scary!!! As stated,... BEEG BADDA F***ING BOOM!

      2. Elmer Phud

        Re: It should be measured in Essex girl knee tremblers.

        Doesn't that only measure frequency?

        1. james 68

          Re: It should be measured in Essex girl knee tremblers.

          they some big girls....

          when their knees tremble not only does the ground shake but due to the revealing nature of their clothing you can see seismic waves flowing across the exposed flab

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