asteroid play a god - like role in the story of aliveness on Earth . But our planet ’s family relationship with fly space tilt does n’t always take a destructive form , like the infamous asteroid that wiped out the dinosaur 66 million years ago . A novel discipline has suggested that a gigantic boom of biodiversity on Earth that pass around 470 million years ago could all be thanks to a cataclysmal collision in the asteroid belt .
Around 466 million years ago , Earth embarked on one of the most monumental explosion of biodiversity in its history , in what ’s now referred to as theGreat Ordovician Biodiversification Event(GOBE ) . During this event , marine biodiversity saw a outstanding growth , mostly within the phylum make during the Cambrian Explosion , the geological period most major creature phylum bolt down up in the fossil record some 541 million years ago . The GOBE finally paved the fashion for the evolution of green algae , archaic fish , cephalopods , corals , and a gang of other creature we would recognize today .
Reporting in the journalScience Advances , scientists from Lund University in Sweden contend that this event was activate by a collision in the asteroid knock somewhere between Mars and Jupiter involve a 150 - kilometer - wide(93 Roman mile ) asteroid .
As per their theory , dust fling out from the crash blocked a significant quantity of sunlight from reaching Earth , make temperature to plummet and a mini chicken feed historic period to come up . In the process of adapting to the new climate – chilly but more suitable for liveliness – a high diverseness of invertebrates arose .
" Our solvent show for the first metre that such dust at times has cool down Earth dramatically . Our survey can give a more elaborated , empirical - based apprehension of how this works , and this , in twist , can be used to evaluate if fashion model simulations are naturalistic , " Birger Schmitz , professor of geology at Lund University and leader of the study , explain ina command .
The team reached this conclusion by read the composition of petrified seafloor sediments in Kinnekulle , southern Sweden . The presence of an isotope of He and other substance trap in the sediments can only be explained by the solar winding having bombarded the rubble , enriching it with those element before it crashed down to Earth .
" This result was wholly unexpected . We have during the last 25 days incline against very dissimilar hypotheses in terms of what happened . It was n’t until we get the last helium measure that everything diminish into place , " said Schmitz .
