Chaos once reigned on Earth.
Huge asteroids or chunks of ancient objects once pummeled planets in the unsettled solar system, and scientists previously found evidence that a particularly monstrous object struck our planet some 3.26 billion years ago. It was 50 to 200 times the size of the dinosaur-killing asteroid. It boiled the oceans, drove global darkness for years to decades, and stoked unimaginable tsunamis (thousands of meters deep) that shredded coastal seafloors.
But even so, new research shows that primitive life found a way to thrive.
“We think of impact events as being disastrous for life,” Nadja Drabon, an earth and planetary scientist at Harvard University who led the study, said in a statement. “But what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on, and these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.”
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