Meteors and comets have captured the public imagination for centuries. They are startled when we see them firing into the night sky – and terrified at the thought that, perhaps, some of them will collide with our planet.
Finally, scientists believe that a meteorite or a comet struck the Earth and destroyed dinosaurs 66 million million years ago.
Yet it was far from a big rock before it collided with our world. Since 2012, some scholars have accepted the hypothesis published by scientists in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters It was the oldest impact crater on Earth – a geographic feature that forms when a small object from space collides with a large object – it was a 62-mile wide Manitsok structure in Greenland. If this assumption were correct, it would mean that the Earth suffered from the influence about billions of years ago.
A new study in Earth and Planetary Science LettersHowever, he denies the possibility.
As the authors of the paper explain, many of the features of the Manitsok formation that early scientists thought meant it could be explained by other natural processes are the crater of impact. For example, the magnetic anomaly associated with a pit is thought to be evidence of a collision with the original. They also argued that some rocks appear to have collapsed with great impact and that there are unusual crystalline structures.
The new paper notes that magnetic anomalies can be illusory, and disappear when viewed on a large scale. For some other supposedly fantastic rock formations? One of the co-authors behind the paper believes this is not unusual.
“I try to be open-minded about everything in science, especially unless you look at the rocks themselves,” said Chris Massive, an assistant geology professor and co-author of the paper at the University of Trincomalee, Canada. “[But] After seeing the rocks, was it kind of ‘hum’? This does not seem to be different from the rocks seen in other parts of the world. ‘So either we missed creations of impact everywhere on earth or it wasn’t one. “
He also pointed out that there are features usually attached to the effect craters that are absent from the Greenland structure.
“All the general criteria used for the evaluation of effect structures, especially microstructures in zircon, were all absent,” Yakimchuk explains. “You have to take everything at once and say, well, what’s the simplest description of all the features we’ve seen? And the simple explanation is that this has no effect.”
As the fictional candidate for the oldest influence pit on Earth without a Greenland structure, the record now goes to the Yararbubba constitution of Western Australia. The Yararubba structure is believed to be 2.23 billion years old.
“To date, no diagnostic evidence of impact-related deformation has been presented, and in addition, the geological features of the region are consistent with existing models of regional endogenic. [non-impact] Processes “The authors concluded in their paper.
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