Scientists know that the Earth was bombarded by huge impactors in distant time, but a new analysis suggests that the number of these impacts may have been 10 times higher than previously thought. This translates into a barrage of collisions—similar in scale to that of the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs—on average every 15 million years between 2.5 and 3.5 billion years ago. Some of these individual impacts may have been much bigger, possibly ranging from city-sized to small province sized. Researchers are also considering what effect the impacts may have had on the Earth’s evolving near-surface chemistry. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference.
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Source: Phys.org