{"id":975070,"date":"2026-08-02T05:59:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T05:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/975070\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T05:59:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T05:59:16","slug":"meteorite-200x-larger-than-the-dinosaur-killer-reshaped-the-course-of-evolution-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/975070\/","title":{"rendered":"Meteorite 200x larger than the dinosaur killer reshaped the course of evolution on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul class=\"MuiTypography-root MuiTypography-paragraph list css-q3r3pl\" data-og-block-area=\"article-blocks\" data-og-block-nth=\"1\" data-og-block-type=\"core\/list\" data-rawhtml=\"1\">\n<li class=\"MuiTypography-root MuiTypography-body1 css-1pbbt52\">A meteorite 50 to 200 times more massive than the one linked to the dinosaurs struck Earth 3.26 billion years ago.<\/li>\n<li class=\"MuiTypography-root MuiTypography-body1 css-1pbbt52\">The impact triggered a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebrighterside.news\/post\/new-computer-model-predicts-volcano-collapses-and-tsunamis\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">tsunami<\/a>, ocean heating and darkness, but it also carried phosphorus and moved iron-rich deep water toward the surface.<\/li>\n<li class=\"MuiTypography-root MuiTypography-body1 css-1pbbt52\">Those nutrients may have helped iron-using microbes recover quickly, showing that early impacts could support life as well as destroy it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A meteorite far larger than the one linked to the dinosaurs struck Earth 3.26 billion years ago, yet the devastation may have briefly created better conditions for some of the planet\u2019s earliest microbes.<\/p>\n<p>The S2 impactor measured an estimated 37 to 58 kilometers across and carried 50 to 200 times the mass of the Chicxulub object. Its collision unleashed a tsunami, heated the atmosphere, disturbed the oceans and darkened the surface with dust.<\/p>\n<p>Rock layers in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barberton_Greenstone_Belt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">South Africa\u2019s Barberton Greenstone Belt<\/a> record what followed. The evidence points to a disaster that damaged shallow-water life, then supplied iron and phosphorus that may have fueled a rapid microbial rebound.<\/p>\n<p>Drabon with students David Madrigal Trejo and \u00d6yk\u00fc Mete during fieldwork in South Africa. (CREDIT: Nadja Drabon) A tsunami rewrote the seafloor<\/p>\n<p>The impact struck during the Paleoarchean era, when bacteria and archaea dominated Earth. Giant space rocks hit the young planet far more often than they do today, perhaps at intervals of at least 15 million years.<\/p>\n<p>Both sites contain a bed of tiny impact-made spheres mixed with coarse debris. The layers begin with erosive surfaces, include material ripped from the seabed and become finer upward as the water lost energy.<\/p>\n<p>Those features closely match tsunami deposits. At Bruce\u2019s Hill, three thick, sphere-bearing sandstone beds may record several powerful currents, backwash flows or reflected waves.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPicture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water. It\u2019s a low-energy environment, without strong currents. Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami, sweeping by and ripping up the sea floor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The sequence formed quickly. Impact spheres likely reached the area within hours, while the slower tsunami followed. Fine debris then settled through the water, creating fallback layers within days.<\/p>\n<p>Rock and thin section images of the Bruce\u2019s Hill and Umbaumba sections. (CREDIT: PNAS) Heat, darkness and evaporating seawater<\/p>\n<p>The collision caused more than violent waves. Rock vapor, melted material and atmospheric heating may have boiled away meters to tens of meters from the ocean\u2019s upper layer.<\/p>\n<p>Unusual crystal-shaped structures appear within and just above the fallback deposit at Umbaumba. The original minerals later dissolved and were replaced by silica, but their shapes remained.<\/p>\n<p>The team argues that these structures most likely formed from aragonite or nahcolite, minerals associated with concentrated brines. Some grew inside sediment, while others may have formed near the surface and settled downward.<\/p>\n<p>Their position directly above the impact layer supports partial <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebrighterside.news\/post\/the-red-sea-was-completely-dry-before-a-massive-indian-ocean-flood-revived-it\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">ocean evaporation<\/a>. Those conditions may have lasted slightly more than a year as heat and erosion reshaped coastal environments.<\/p>\n<p>Dust added another blow. Material thrown into the atmosphere may have blocked sunlight for years or decades, while suspended particles made the ocean murky.<\/p>\n<p>That combination would have struck photosynthetic microbes especially hard. The tsunami also tore through microbial communities living on the shallow seafloor.<\/p>\n<p>Schematic representation of possible effects of the impact on environments and life. (CREDIT: PNAS) Deep iron reached the sunlit ocean<\/p>\n<p>The same tsunami that caused destruction also mixed ocean layers that had remained chemically separate.<\/p>\n<p>Before the impact, shallow water at both sites contained little dissolved iron. Deeper water held much more ferrous iron, a form that some microbes could use.<\/p>\n<p>Iron concentrations rose sharply after S2. At Bruce\u2019s Hill, average values increased about sixfold. At Umbaumba, they later climbed as much as 17-fold.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers considered volcanic activity, crustal uplift, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebrighterside.news\/post\/scientists-discovered-a-massive-hydrothermal-world-hidden-beneath-the-pacific-ocean\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">hydrothermal systems<\/a> and changes in water depth. The evidence did not show the shifts expected from a major rise in volcanic material or global hydrothermal activity.<\/p>\n<p>Ocean mixing offered the simplest explanation. The tsunami likely crossed the chemical boundary separating iron-rich deep water from depleted surface water, lifting ferrous iron into the sunlit zone.<\/p>\n<p>Phosphorus also increased. Concentrations reached 1,300 parts per million in one Bruce\u2019s Hill sample with the greatest abundance of impact spheres.<\/p>\n<p>Some phosphorus may have come from the meteorite. More arrived as the tsunami washed debris into the sea and the hot post-impact climate accelerated weathering on land.<\/p>\n<p>Photomicrographs of pseudomorphs. (A\u2013C) Representative Type 1 pseudomorphs from the fallback layer. (D) Randomly oriented Type 1 pseudomorphs and thin, discontinuous silica crusts (red arrows). (E) Type 2 pseudomorphs imbricated from slight sedimentary reworking. (F) Tightly packed Type 2 pseudomorphs showing preferred orientation parallel to bedding and minor organic matter. The pseudomorphs are overlain by a layer of organic matter. (CREDIT: PNAS) Microbial life returned quickly<\/p>\n<p>The immediate effects were almost certainly harmful. Shallow-water organisms faced seafloor erosion, darkness, heat, evaporation and turbid water.<\/p>\n<p>Yet the rocks do not preserve evidence of a long biological collapse. Instead, carbon chemistry and iron-rich minerals indicate that life persisted and may have recovered rapidly.<\/p>\n<p>Bacteria and archaea can have huge populations, fast reproduction and flexible metabolisms. Their rebound could therefore have occurred much faster than the recovery of animals after the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebrighterside.news\/post\/dust-from-the-chicxulub-asteroid-baked-dinosaurs-alive-within-hours-of-impact\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Chicxulub impact<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The strongest biological signal involves iron cycling. More ferrous iron in shallow water could have supported microbes that used iron during photosynthesis. The resulting oxidized iron could support other microbes that consumed organic matter through iron reduction.<\/p>\n<p>Iron oxides, siderite and related minerals became unusually common above the impact horizon. Siderite repeatedly appears beside organic matter, supporting the idea that microbial iron reduction helped form it within sediment.<\/p>\n<p>Carbon isotope values also became more stable in iron-rich layers with little reworked debris. The pattern suggests a connection between the changing carbon cycle and the sudden availability of iron, although uncertainty remains.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe think of impact events as being disastrous for life,\u201d Drabon explained. \u201cBut what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on \u2026 these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Stratigraphic sections of the Bruce\u2019s Hill and Umbaumba locations. The Inset shows the top of the fallback layer. (CREDIT: PNAS) Practical implications of the research<\/p>\n<p>The S2 record changes how scientists can assess giant impacts on the early biosphere. Destruction was only one part of the outcome.<\/p>\n<p>For microbes near the surface, the first years may have brought severe stress or death. Organisms deeper in the water, including those that did not depend on sunlight, likely faced fewer immediate effects.<\/p>\n<p>Once dust cleared and evaporated water returned, the ocean contained more nutrients and usable iron. Those changes may have triggered a temporary bloom of iron-cycling microbes.<\/p>\n<p>The findings give geologists clues to seek at other <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebrighterside.news\/post\/dantes-inferno-suggests-hell-and-purgatory-mirror-the-physics-of-a-massive-asteroid-impact\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">ancient impact sites<\/a>, including tsunami deposits, evaporite minerals, phosphorus spikes, iron-rich layers and shifts in carbon chemistry.<\/p>\n<p>They also show why early impacts cannot be judged only through later mass extinctions. On a microbial Earth, a catastrophe could destroy habitats, create new ones and briefly expand the resources available to life.<\/p>\n<p>Related Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A meteorite 50 to 200 times more massive than the one linked to the dinosaurs struck Earth 3.26&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":975071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[391279,391280,391281,158617,391282,144920,14232,391283,391284,391285,391286,391287,391288,357572,1183,391289,159,12982,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-975070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ancient-meteorite","tag-bacteria-and-archaea","tag-barberton-greenstone-belt","tag-carbon-isotopes","tag-early-earth","tag-green-good-news","tag-harvard-university","tag-impact-tsunami","tag-iron-cycling","tag-microbial-life","tag-nadja-drabon","tag-ocean-evaporation","tag-paleoarchean-era","tag-phosphorus","tag-research","tag-s2-meteorite-impact","tag-science","tag-space-news","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117024389154274063","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=975070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/975071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=975070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=975070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=975070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}