About half a billion years ago, on Earth, there was a massive explosion of species development causing the biodiversity of animals to amplify noticeably, but the actual of that event has remained a mystery till now.
On Wednesday, in a newspaper published in Science Advances, scientists show that the event’s onset agreed with the major documented asteroid breakup in the asteroid belt over the long-ago two billion years.
Birger Schmitz, the study’s co-author and a professor of nuclear physics at Lund University in the conversation writes, ‘the blocking effect of this dust might have partially stopped sunlight from reaching the Earth and lead to cooler temperatures.’ ‘We know that this involved the temperature changing from being more or less consistent to becoming divided into climate regions, from Arctic conditions at the poles to the tropical environment at the equator.’ ‘The high diversity among invertebrates, including primitive fish, green algae, corals and cephalopods, came as an adaptation to the new climate.’
Schmitz, as well as his colleagues, also considered the distribution of very fine-grained, very tiny dust in the sediment, determining its space source by discovering helium and new substances inside the sediments.
Schmitz writes, ‘Our results visibly demonstrate that after the breakup, the huge amounts of fine-grained dust reached Earth shortly.’ The work has suggestions for climate research and the warming for the atmosphere of the earth that is taking place.
