Last year we talked about how meteor impact led to pastoral revolution and now recent research on Earth’s surface revealed that the planet was in a constant reprocessing process due to the huge asteroid impacts. The new approach utilizing the terrestrial bombardment model based on lunar and terrestrial data disclosed that asteroid collisions where the game changer which caused evolution of the topmost layers of Earth during its initial stages, which happened around 4.5b years ago.
Yvonne Pendleton, NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) Director added that repeated asteroid impacts could have resulted in burial of extensive amount of Earth’s crust, which today is known as the planet’s earliest and oldest rocks.
The model also suggested that the impacts had led to growth phases on Earth. For instance, first impact might have resulted in ‘planetary embryos’, then relatively bigger impact may have caused much larger ‘proto-planet’ that could also have resulted in the formation of moon. Again after a periodical bombardment, Earth might have experienced the extinction of dinosaurs and so on.
Late bombardment contributed insignificant than the former huge asteroid impacts estimated the researchers. They went further saying that the initial impacts contributed substantial towards the geological evolution of early Earth. These asteroidal collisions not altered the Earth’s geology but also accelerated the consequent evolution of life.
The impacts were huge, hardly any region on Earth was left untouched by the effect, and eventually this became an important step towards subsequent habitability.
Source: Space Fellowship
