Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchean environment and life

I love this type of articles where we can reconstruct what happened so long ago just based on careful observations.

Some other instances I've come across:

* The K-Pg extinction event that wiped off dinosaurs had the impact it did because the asteroid happened to impact a shallow water region. This kicked up a lot of sulfur (in gypsum) that further affected global climate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Effects

* Earth likely had rings ~466M years ago. We deduced this by looking at impact craters from that time period, and seeing that they all lie near the equator (accounting for continental drift): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...

* Earth's rotation period was probably frozen at 21h, ~600M years ago, likely due to interaction between lunar and solar tides. This resonance could have been broken by ice ages (!!!). Amazing to think that global climate affects earth's rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Resonant_st...

> reconstruct what happened so long ago just based on careful observations.

Me too! My book is filled with them. Like how minerals in lava, affected by Earth's magnetic field, lock into place while cooling, which provides us with yet another cross-check for radiometric dating. See page 23:

https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

Not to nitpick but the dinosaurs were on already on the way out, the asteroid merely finished them off early.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosau...

To the best of my knowledge not everyone agrees to that hypothesis. One of the strongest arguments against it is that paleontological evidence is always incomplete. Holes in it that are treated in favor of the hypothesis are actually smaller or comparable to holes that appear just due to incompleteness.

The dinosaurs were not “wiped off”, by which I mean they are not extinct. This is an extremely widespread misconception that popular science articles like this one keep perpetuating. We should do better and help people understand that (some) dinosaurs survived and evolved into modern birds. Birds are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are alive today.

When referring to dinosaurs, most people are thinking about non-avian, teethed dinosaurs anyway.

Here is the Chixculub impact effect in realtime simulated as happening in today's world: https://youtu.be/ya3w1bvaxaQ?si=S-jmFegMo63HKzID

Read the article. That's the subplot. We get to see just how non-scientific science really is. The true and current evidence points to an asteroid being the final blow to an already declining environment. But the status quo narrative so strong that egos and biases override facts.

I get that, but most people don't know that birds evolved from dinosaurs that survived the asteroid (which I think is both interesting and important to know) and I think it's the responsibility of science communicators to... communicate that.