EAN: 9789400763272

THE ASTEROID IMPACT CONNECTION OF PLANETARY EVO...

When in 1981 Louis and Walter Alvarez  the father and son team  unearthed a tell-tale
Iridium-rich sedimentary horizon at the 65 million years-old Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary at
Gubbio  Italy  their find heralded a paradigm shift in the study of terrestrial evolution.
Since the 1980s the discovery and study of asteroid impact ejecta in the oldest well-preserved
terrains of Western Australia and South Africa  by Don Lowe  Gary Byerly  Bruce Simonson  Scott
Hassler  the author and others  and the documentation of new exposed and buried impact
structures in several continents  have led to a resurgence of the idea of the catastrophism
theory of Cuvier  previously largely supplanted by the uniformitarian theory of Hutton and
Lyell. Several mass extinction of species events are known to have occurred in temporal
proximity to large asteroid impacts  global volcanic eruptions and continental splitting.
Likely links are observed between asteroid clusters and the 580 Ma acritarch radiation 
end-Devonian extinction  end-Triassic extinction and end-Jurassic extinction. New discoveries
of ~3.5 ¿ 3.2 Ga-old impact fallout units in South Africa have led Don Lowe and Gary Byerly to
propose a protracted prolongation of the Late Heavy Bombardment (~3.95-3.85 Ga) in the
Earth-Moon system. Given the difficulty in identifying asteroid impact ejecta units and buried
impact structures  it is likely new discoveries of impact signatures are in store  which would
further profoundly alter models of terrestrial evolution..

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