[ad_1]
Our planet is covered with ice.
Well before the age of the dinosaurs, about 466 million years ago, the Earth was icy. One of the mysteries of science was the reason it happened. Scientists think they have finally found the answer: during the explosion of an asteroid of a width of 150 km somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, a huge amount of dust is deposited on the soil for two million years, reports the newspaper Chronicle.info with reference to charter97.org.
"This spatial dust has covered the sunlight and triggered the global cooling that has occurred relatively gradually: life can adapt and even benefit from the changes – new species have evolved to survive in regions at different temperatures "
"This critical episode of the diversification of marine life known as the Ordovician's great bio-diversity, in which the world where marine invertebrate biodiversity was relatively low, has doubled and almost reached the current level. . This has led to the growth of plankton – the base of marine food webs, many species living on the reefs, such as sponges and corals, as well as the inhabitants of the seabed, such as starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers ".
"On the ground, there is always a lot of space dust, small particles of asteroids and comets," writes the Daily Mail, pointing out that the amount of interplanetary dust that falls on Earth in one year can be measured in thousands of trucks. "But between Mars and Jupiter, 466 million years ago, divided an asteroid to a width of 150 km, it created a lot more dust than usual. Some 10 million years after the explosion, dust is attacked by about 10 million trucks.
"Every year Earth receives about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material," says Philipp Heck, curator of the Museum Field Museum, an associate professor at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of an article in Science Advances. – Imagine that you multiply by a thousand or ten thousand times.
"Our results first show that such dust has sometimes strongly cooled the Earth," says Professor Birger Schmitz of the Swedish University of Lund, lead author of the study and research associate of the Field Museum.
"To put this information in place, his team conducted a search for traces of space dust in the rocks of 466 million years ago and compared them to tiny micrometeorites from Antarctica, taken as a reference," said the article. – (…) Professor Schmitz and his colleagues first showed that this ice age was synchronized with the excessive dust in the atmosphere.
"A temporary coincidence seems perfect," he says.
"It is tempting to believe that the problem of current global warming can be solved by playing on the dust floods that caused the planet to cool down 466 million years ago. But Hyuk said he'd be careful: "Geo-engineering proposals need to be evaluated very critically and very cautiously, because if something goes wrong, things can get worse than before."
Although I am not sure that we have found a solution to the problem of climate change, he thinks we would do well to think in that direction. "We are experiencing global warming, it's undeniable," he says. And we need to think about how to prevent or minimize catastrophic consequences. Should explore all reasonable ideas. "
[ad_2]
Source link