The collision of a meteorite four times larger than Everest boosted life on Earth – The Observer

A geological study that analyzed rock samples in South Africa's Barberton Greenstone Belt has found that the impact of a meteorite that fell to Earth 3.26 billion years ago, and which was more than four times the size of Mount Everest, may have favored the beginning of life on the planet.

The team, led by Nadia Drabon, a professor at Harvard University, studied the S2 meteorite (between 30 and 60 kilometers), which would be 200 times larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs and led to a tsunami that shook the ocean and transported land debris. For coastal areas. The heat resulting from the collision caused the upper layer of the sea to evaporate and the temperature of the atmosphere to rise. A thick cloud of dust covered everything, darkening the planet and hindering any photosynthetic activities that were occurring.

If this impact indicated that the Earth would be destroyed and reduced to ash, Nadia Drabon explained that it was a trigger: “Until recently, the impacts were considered catastrophic for evolution. However, this way of thinking is changing, and it is now believed that life was not just resilient In fact, it may have benefited from these violent events.

[Já saiu o quarto episódio de “A Grande Provocadora”, o novo podcast Plus do Observador que conta a história de Vera Lagoa, a mulher que afrontou Salazar, desafiou os militares de Abril e ridicularizou os que se achavam donos do país. Pode ouvir aqui, no Observador, e também na Apple Podcasts e no Spotify. E pode ouvir aqui o primeiro episódio, aqui o segundo e aqui o terceiro.]

The impact of the meteorite when it struck the Earth was so great that experts can track it to this day. to deal With the investigation conducted by the scientific journal PNAS, the meteorite did not end life that began to awaken in the form of single-celled organisms, but on the contrary, it only enhanced it.

The study in question concluded that bacterial life quickly recovered, allowing for a sharp increase in the numbers of single-celled organisms. Basically, for example, it was shown that even bacteria need nutrition and the meteorite ended up working as the perfect recipe.

If it was believed that the meteorite even had a negative impact, initially, on life forms on land and in shallow waters, the study finds that after the first strike there was a rapid recovery. Drabon explains that Earth's first oceans were supposed to be “biological deserts due to lack of nutrients” and that the meteorite strike “released essential nutrients on a global scale.” It was a “fertilizer bomb,” as one of the students involved in the investigation in question summed up.