Veil of Dust From Ancient Asteroid Breakup May Have Cooled Earth
Faced with a dangerously warming world, would-be geoengineers have dreamed up ways to quickly turn down the heat. One proposed technique: spreading a veil of dust that would sit in space or Earth’s atmosphere and reflect sunlight. Researchers say they have now found evidence for a similar experiment that played out naturally, 466 million years ago, when an asteroid out in space exploded into bits. Dust from the breakup blanketed the planet, says Birger Schmitz, a geologist at Lund University in Sweden, plunging it into an ice age that was soon followed by an explosion in animal life.
The ancient episode offers both encouragement and caution for geoengineers. If Schmitz is right, it dramatically demonstrates how dust can cool the planet. But the deep freeze is a lesson in potential unintended consequences. “Maybe our study will trigger a big academic controversy,” says Schmitz, who leads a study published this week in Science Advances.
All over the world, the ratio of decaying isotopes in a common meteorite type suggests the space rocks formed in a singular shock event 466 million years ago. Models based on how long they took to cool suggest they came from a 150-kilometer-wide parent body, which broke up in a collision in the asteroid belt beyond Mars, sending a stream of fragments into the inner solar system. Bits from the breakup still fall to Earth today.
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