Asteroid Breakup 8 Million Years Ago Cooled Climate

CLIMATE SCIENCE

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Southwest Research Institute, and Charles University in the Czech Republic have shown that the breakup of the 100-mile-wide asteroid called Veritas blanketed the Earth with an exceptionally large volume of extraterrestrial dust. Using computer models to track the orbits of the asteroid fragments backwards in time, they found that 8.2 million years ago, all of its fragments shared the same orbital orientation in space. This event coincides with a spike in interplanetary dust in seafloor sediments./

by Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) Jan 18, 2006
The explosion of a large asteroid some 8.3 million years ago showered the Earth with so much dust that the planet's climate system may have cooled, a study published on Thursday says.

California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers say that cores drilled into sea sediment show peaks in 3He -- a non-radioactive isotope of helium that is rare on Earth but representative of interplanetary dust.

These peaks coincide with other research data pointing to a "modest global cooling" and a strengthening of Asia's monsoon cycle.

The increased dust shower lasted for about 1.5 million years, the scientists report in the weekly issue of Nature, the British weekly science journal.

The asteroid's breakup is believed to have caused the so-called Veritas family of orbiting rocky debris.

There have been numerous periods of climate cooling in Earth's history, most of them attributed to atmospheric concentrations of dust, such as volcanic eruptions or soil particles kicked up by a collision with asteroids or comets.

Source: Agence France-Presse

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