A new study finds that an asteroid impact can turn living things into coal
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – The last moments of microbial life could tell more about how severe the impact of space rocks on Earth was in the past. Recent studies show that charred corpses of microorganisms also killed by the impact asteroid medium can show the amount of damage produced by a cosmic collision.
A team of researchers examined four craters in Estonia, Poland and Canada created thousands of years apart. Regardless of the geographic distance and the amount of time between these impacts, the team found millimeters to centimeters chunks of coal mixed with the material formed during each of these impacts, the authors said.
“Coal is made up of organisms killed, roasted and buried by asteroids,” lead author Anna Losiak, who works at the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, told the BBC. Space. The discovery of the ancient asteroid organism was different from the coal associated with normal forest fires, which was the team’s main hypothesis for a while.
Coal formed by impact rather than fire is much more homogeneous and exhibits a lower forming temperature. Losiak said the impact of the coal found in the crater was similar, but not identical, to the coal that forms when wood mixes with pyroclastic flows. Pyroclastic flows are formed by volcanic eruptions. The impact crater, which is only up to 200 meters in diameter, was formed 200 years or more and therefore presents many opportunities to study the formation conditions.
“Most people are attracted to giant collisions because they are capable of causing destruction on a planetary scale, the reduction of dinosaurs is the best and by far the only example of such an event,” he said referring to. event of the asteroid that caused it extinction of dinosaurs non-avian 66 million years ago.
Losiak first discovered a mysterious coal near a small impact crater in Estonia. He started working during summer school opportunities as a PhD. and then he returned a year later to lead a project to discover and study palm soil. Paleosoil, he said, was ancient terrain covered with material ejected from the crater during its formation.
As it turned out, the team never found paleosil. But after three days of manual excavation, a time-consuming necessity due to environmental protection, his team found coal.
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