December 14, 2017
Impact signature in rock produced by lightning strikes
When a meteorite smashes into Earth’s rocky surface, the immense temperatures and pressures created can melt rock into glass and leave signatures …
The EARTH archive
Impact
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20 articles · Page 1 of 1
September 19, 2017
Minerals deformed by meteorites reveal age of impact
Researchers have discovered a new way to determine when a meteorite hit Earth, a technique that could not only help scientists date ancient …
June 16, 2017
Platinum may point to impact theory for Younger Dryas
Some large meteorite strikes leave obvious craters on Earth’s surface, while others that hit water or ice or explode in the air may only leave …
January 25, 2017
Mystery impact may have kicked off dramatic warming event
About 56 million years ago, the planet warmed rapidly in a mysterious event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Researchers …
December 31, 2015
Impact or eruptions: Are both to blame in the great end-Cretaceous whodunit?
Few episodes in geologic history are as widely recognized as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary 66 million years ago. Utter “K-Pg,” …
December 23, 2015
Meteorites might have created Earth's earliest continents
Massive meteorite impacts on Earth are destructive events, gouging enormous craters in the crust and raining debris over the planet’s surface. …
September 22, 2015
Geologic Column: The 'impact factor' of potholes
Last winter was truly severe in the northeastern U.S. Snowfall records were blown away in cities like Boston, which finally saw its last snow …
September 21, 2015
Ancient asteroids boiled Earth's oceans
The asteroid that wiped out the remaining dinosaurs — save for the avian variety — 66 million years ago was roughly 10 kilometers wide. Long …
June 8, 2015
Benchmarks: July 22,1960: Mineral discovery ends Meteor Crater debate
In 1923, Daniel Moreau Barringer stood on the edge of a vast bowl-shaped depression in the Arizona desert, watching a drill rig bore into the …
May 14, 2015
Giant bolide hit South Africa 2.5 billion years ago
Some of the oldest scraps of continental crust on Earth cling to the southern tip of Africa and the western edge of Australia. In both places, …
November 4, 2014
Mineral in Chelyabinsk meteorite reveals past collision
A new analysis of fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite — which burst over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013 — reveals that its parent …
August 12, 2014
Africa's impact is one that even the dinosaurs would have seen coming
The crater left by the infamous Chicxulub asteroid responsible for finishing off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, was more than 19 …
August 8, 2014
Acid oceans followed Chicxulub impact
Within days after the massive Chicxulub impact that ended the Cretaceous Period 65.5 million years ago, a deluge of acid rain may have turned …
July 18, 2014
Ancient seawater found in Chesapeake Bay impact crater
When the bolide struck in the Late Eocene, it shattered the bedrock, truncated aquifers and left a crater roughly twice the size of Rhode Island …
May 12, 2014
Lessons from the Russian meteor burst
At about 9:20 a.m. on Feb. 15, 2013, many of those cameras recorded the explosion of a large meteor 23 kilometers above the city. As was widely …
June 13, 2013
Iowa impact crater confirmed
An airborne geophysical survey mapping mineral resources in the Midwest has confirmed that a 470-million-year-old impact crater nearly five times …
January 5, 2012
Travels in Geology: Chesapeake Bay, from impact craters to executive orders
The lower part of the Chesapeake Bay offers more than crab cakes and boating. Today, the bay is central to one of country’s largest environmental …
January 5, 2012
Santa Fe impact crater discovery: A series of fortunate events
In the ancient pink and orange hills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Thornton “Tim” McElvain, a retired petroleum geologist, leads me over a …
January 5, 2012
Giant dunes, not mega-tsunami deposits?
About four years ago, a group of scientists proposed that a series of giant, wedge-shaped sandy deposits found along the shores of southern …
January 5, 2012
Do impacts trigger extinctions? Impact theory still controversial
The revolution started with a bang in 1980. For some, this revolution became a religion, even an orthodoxy. The true believers became proselytes …