A new study has revealed that the Earth might have been hit by a comet some 56 million years ago, but its impact is being felt up until today. What does it mean for today's generation?
Today's climate change, or the rapid warming of the Earth's surface, might have resulted from a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth some millions of millions of years ago. The said clash might have triggered what is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). A research from at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute attributed this incident to the microtektites or tiny dark glassy spheres they found near the stratigraphic level of PETM boundary, News Wise reported.
"This tells us that there was an extraterrestrial impact at the time this sediment was deposited - a space rock hit the planet. The coincidence of an impact with a major climate change is nothing short of remarkable," said Morgan Schaller, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Rensselaer.
While the current global warming mankind is experiencing, which is accelerating at a rapid and alarming rate, is largely attributed to human activities and natural phenomena like massive volcanism, the new study suggest the warming is triggered by something else, coming from an ancient impact from space. "This could very well be the ground zero [of the PETM]. It got warm in a hurry. This suggests where it came from," said Dennis Kent, a researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University.
However, the study also has its share of criticism. Gerald Dickens, a marine geologist at Rice University who studies the PETM, said that the study published in Science journal does not "really explain anything." He argues that there many ways to explain why carbon input took thousands of years, but "[f]inding a few spherules does not change this."
