Latest Impact events Stories

A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth. These new data are the latest to strongly...

Around 250 million years ago, most life on Earth was wiped out in an extinction known as the “Great Dying.” A team led by University of Cincinnati geologist Thomas J. Algeo finds that the end came slowly from thousands of centuries of volcanic activity. A painstakingly detailed investigation shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events. The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life, and it killed in stages, according to a...

Results stem from largest ever examination of fossil marine species It's well known that Earth's most severe mass extinction occurred about 250 million years ago. What's not well known is the specific time when the extinctions occurred. A team of researchers from North America and China have published a paper in Science this week which explicitly provides the date and rate of extinction. "This is the first paper to provide rates of such massive extinction," says Dr. Charles Henderson,...

The cataclysmic events that marked the end of the Permian Period some 252 million years ago were a watershed moment in the history of life on Earth. As much as 90 percent of ocean organisms were extinguished, ushering in a new order of marine species, some of which we still see today. But while land dwellers certainly sustained major losses, the extent of extinction and the reshuffling afterward were less clear. In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B,...

Results contradict several theories for cause of extinction While the cause of the mass extinction that occurred between the Permian and Triassic periods is still uncertain, two University of Rhode Island researchers collected data that show that terrestrial biodiversity recovered much faster than previously thought, potentially contradicting several theories for the cause of the extinction. David Fastovsky, URI professor of geosciences, and graduate student David Tarailo found that...

The end-Permian extinction, by far the most dramatic biological crisis to affect life on Earth, may not have been as catastrophic for some creatures as previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Bristol.An international team of researchers studied the parareptiles, a diverse group of bizarre-looking terrestrial vertebrates which varied in shape and size.  Some were small, slender, agile and lizard-like creatures, while others attained the size of rhinos; many had...

A hurtling asteroid about the size of the Titanic caused the scar that appeared in Jupiter's atmosphere on July 19, 2009, according to two papers published recently in the journal Icarus.Data from three infrared telescopes enabled scientists to observe the warm atmospheric temperatures and unique chemical conditions associated with the impact debris. By piecing together signatures of the gases and dark debris produced by the impact shockwaves, an international team of scientists was able to...

After a volcanic eruption that occurred around 250 million years ago, hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the planet, almost 95 percent of all primitive life living in the ocean and 70 percent of all animals evolving on land were wiped out. Researchers at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada have discovered evidence suggesting that massive volcanic eruptions at the time burnt significant levels of coal, producing suffocating clouds of ash and dust...

Geologists at Brown University and the University of Washington have a cautionary tale: Lose enough species in the oceans, and the entire ecosystem could collapse. Looking at two of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history, the scientists attribute the ecosystems' collapse to a loss in the variety of species sharing the same space. It took up to 10 million years after the mass extinctions for the ecosystem to stabilize. The findings appear in Geology.The world's oceans are under...

Collapse of Earth's marine life 378 to 375 million years ago holds keyAn influx of invasive species can stop the dominant natural process of new species formation and trigger mass extinction events, according to research results published Dec. 29 in the journal PLoS ONE.The study of the collapse of Earth's marine life 378 to 375 million years ago suggests that the planet's current ecosystems, which are struggling with biodiversity loss, could meet a similar fate.Although Earth has experienced...