Research: Earth in the past was hit quite often by an asteroid the size of a city

In a statement, Marchi said he and his colleagues had developed a so-called collision flux model that allowed them to conclude there was an asteroid collision that was more ancient than previously thought. It works by using direct evidence of ancient asteroid collisions.

He said: “With this approach, we found that current models of early Earth asteroid collisions greatly underestimate the number of known impacts, as recorded by the spherical layer.

“The actual collision could have been up to 10 times higher than previously thought in the period between 3.5 and 2.5 billion years ago.

“This means that in that early period, we were probably being hit by a Chicxulub-sized asteroid impact on average every 15 million years.”

The Chicxulub asteroid impact is the name given to an asteroid strike that occurred about 66 million years ago that is thought to have caused the extinction of 75 percent of life on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs, according to the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas.

Marchi added that this research could help scientists understand whether the asteroid collision may have affected the development of oxygen in the atmosphere.

Dan Rosalie Tostevin of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Cape Town, who was not involved in the work, said in a press release of the Goldschmidt conference: “Unfortunately, some rocks from far into the past survived, so direct evidence for the collision, and their ecological consequences, patchy.

“The model put forward by Dr. Marchi helps us to get a better feel for the number and size of collisions on the early Earth.”

Marchi told Newsweek a paper on the topic has been submitted to the journal for review and is the result of “a worldwide collaboration.” He has written a book, Colliding Worlds, about the effects of asteroid impacts on the development of life on Earth.

– .