The Surprising Theory of an Asteroid Ring Around Earth Has Some Wild Implications for Evolution.

Like most of us, the Earth has ancient symbols. The surface of our planet has a group of ancient craters that were formed 465 million years ago. The divots were created when marine animals took on many new forms, building complex ecosystems from plankton to jawless fish to aerial feeders. Back then, those strange creatures could look up at night and see the glow of the ring of the Earth, which may have been something like Saturn.

Seeing the Milky Way on a clear night is truly amazing. I envy the old fish and old crabs that would have seen Earth’s fleeting garbage collection. That band, which Monash University planetary scientist Andrew Tomkins and his colleagues argue in a new paper, could be the result of an asteroid passing close to our planet in the first history to be broken into countless pieces. (Unlike Saturn’s ring, it wouldn’t be made of so much ice.) The smaller, iron-rich rocks stayed in orbit for a long time, but—as explained by my new favorite part of the technical term—”broken off” about 465. million years ago, some of which fell to Earth. And although a group of ancient craters are the only visible evidence that such a ring once existed, life on Earth may record a geological miracle.

The new hypothesis that there was such a ring is still in its early stages, and not every proposed ring is always placed in our modern scientific visions. the previous one. Geologists once suggested that the Earth had a ring during the Eocene, about 35.5 million years ago, but this idea was more related to the search for the cause of the change in climate older than the hard evidence from the rock record. It is possible that the Ordovician craters in the Earth’s rock record were created by another interstellar event, such as debris from an asteroid forming a small moon that broke apart. Regardless of what happened, we do know that some rare event moved a lot of rocks around the world 465 million years ago, a small space that reaches the Earth.

Let’s assume that the origin of those stones was a ring, and follow the effects of such a debris field: If the Earth wore a ring around its center, it would affect the way the light the sun reaching the surface of the earth. Perhaps the ring would have covered the planet’s hemispheres during the winter, with summer temperatures increasing slightly on one side, Tomkins and co-authors suggest. A large amount of dust from the asteroid and the impact of smaller fragments may have affected the sunlight and the Earth’s climate, possibly helping to explain why the Earth turned into an ice sheet between of 444 and 463 million ago. And as we well know from our current habit of turning the ice climate into a greenhouse, a changed climate has a profound effect on life on our planet.

During the time when the Earth would have gained and lost its ring, life was going through an amazing explosion of evolution. Paleontologists know this as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Think of it as a sequence of famous big explosions, just before the Cambrian, that saw the rapid origin of many different species and groups of marine life. GOBE was an extension of the next generation of those previous heads, everything from algae to the first fish and fish to evolve into new species and create the environment we see now. in today’s seas. It was the assembly of what we can think of as the modern marine ecosystem, a rich plankton that allows many other forms of life to thrive.

Finding the cause of GOBE is tricky if not impossible, as this is not Sim Earth and we will not be able to repeat different situations to see what best suits our feelings. However, perhaps the Earth’s ring and climate effects had the greatest impact on life on Earth, and it was the sudden change in the world that caused life to change in different ways. And whether it’s a ring, a small moon, or another event, the scattering of space rocks around our planet may have created the conditions that created what we think of as “modern” oceans. now”.

Fifty years ago, such theories were accepted by scientists as the most fanciful and fanciful. Evolution was often thought of when talking about the ways of the world. (It still is, in most cases.) But today, we can imagine how a nearby asteroid and a possible ring around Earth affected life in the past because we know that space debris is had a profound impact on life at one time. Long after GOBE, about 66 million years ago, when life on Earth was as diverse as the oceans, a 6-kilometer-wide star hit Earth in what we now call Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. The heat from the debris from the strike wiped out every non-avian dinosaur on Earth within a day, soot and dust filled with solar-reflective compounds caused winter had a worldwide influence that lasted at least three years. The world did not lose almost all the dinosaurs; it also lost flying pterosaurs, sea-dwelling mosasaurs, and toilet-seat-sized rock-building clams, in addition to mass extinctions of mammals, lizards, birds, and even and plankton. Just this year, planetary scientists identified the asteroid as a carbonaceous chondrite, a metal-heavy rock left over from the formation of our planets that was dragged on a collision course with Earth by a catastrophic impact. by a million to one odds of all time. .

For all the destruction the space rock caused, it cleared the way for many other living things. Without that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here or even care about the planet we now call home.

Primates were already around when the asteroid hit, during the Northern Hemisphere’s spring 66 million years ago. When they came out of hiding after the first day and hunted for food in the following years of darkness, the world changed dramatically. Angiosperms, or flowering plants, grew faster and thicker than their predecessors. The iron from the giant asteroid was distributed in dust debris and fertile soil across the planet, allowing Earth to host the first tropical rain forests. And in addition to drawing dinosaurs to grow plants and keep forests open, plants thickened into habitats with many species that served as a catalyst for the evolution of mammals. It is here that our ancestors, among many other forms of life, found themselves in a dense world of new habitats. The dinosaurs were gone, but competition for space and food among these small creatures pushed the remaining species into new species. If the asteroid had missed or hit a different spot on the planet, then the world would have continued to be covered in forests of oozing monkey trees and ginkgoes, and a place where dinosaurs of all kinds and the size that spread as mammals flourished. in small size.

The evolution of life on Earth is often discussed and debated about what is happening on our planet. Life adapts to cooperation and competition, climate change and human influence. But Earth exists as part of a planetary system, a galaxy, and a universe—and sometimes other parts of our universe visit us. Earth is not an isolated terrarium, and life on it is influenced by nearby impacts and stresses such as continental drift. We cannot answer why birds are the only dinosaurs alive, or perhaps even how our oceans built their complex environments, without talking about asteroids and their effects. Accelerated rocks have changed the evolution of life so imperceptibly that it is often easy to write them off as a rare and unusual part of history. We are beginning to see different evidence. We came into being because of an asteroid, after all, our story is connected more than 9 billion kilometers from the end of our solar system. It’s fun, because of the possibility of my existence because of the cold stone that took away the dinosaurs that I wish I could see. live