Giant meteorite impact 3.26 billion years ago may have aided early life
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Billions of years ago, long before anything resembling life as we know it existed, meteorites frequently pummeled the planet. One such space rock crashed down about 3.26 billion years ago, and even today, it's revealing secrets about Earth's past.
Nadja Drabon, an early-Earth geologist and assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, is insatiably curious about what our planet was like during ancient eons rife with meteoritic bombardment, when only single-celled bacteria and archaea reigned—and when it all started to change. When did the first oceans appear? What about continents? Plate tectonics? How did all those violent impacts affect the evolution of life?
A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on some of these questions, in relation to the inauspiciously named "S2" meteoritic impact of over 3 billion years ago, and for which geological evidence is found in the Barberton Greenstone belt of South Africa today.
