The last moments of some organisms may show us more about how serious space rock impacts were in the past.
The amount of damage caused by a crash can be seen by the charred bodies of the organisms that were killed.
The craters in Poland and Canada were created thousands of years ago. The team found pieces of charcoal mixed in with the material that was formed during each of the impacts despite their geographical distance.
Anna Losiak, lead author of the paper, told Space.com that the charcoal was formed from organisms killed by the asteroid. The team's leading hypothesis for a while was the discovery of ancient asteroid-battered organisms.
There is a question about why sci-fi is obsessed with asteroid impact disasters.
She said that the charcoal formed by impact is much more homogeneity and points to a lower temperature of formation.
The impact charcoal found in the craters was not the same as the charcoal formed when wood is mixed with water. Pyrroclastic flows come from eruptions of volcanos.
She said that the smaller impact craters Losiak studies are formed every 200 years or so and present many opportunities to study formation conditions.
The diminishment of dinosaurs is the best example of this kind of event because it's capable of causing planet-scale damage.
There are asteroids in space.
The charcoal was found near a small impact crater. After graduating from summer school, she returned a year later to lead a project to uncover and study thepaleosoil. She said that paleosoil is an ancient soil covered by material that was removed from the crater.
The team didn't find the paleosoil. She and her team had to dig by hand for three days because of environmental protection.
She said that at first, they thought the charcoal was formed by the fires, but then it became entangled in the extraterrestrial situation. I started to think that something wasn't right after finding similar charcoal in other impact craters.
She said that it seemed odd that there would be so many large wildfires shortly before the formation of four different impact craters created far away from each other.
She said that they decided to look at the properties of charcoal pieces found intermixed within material ejected from craters and compare it to wildfire charcoal. The team discovered that the fires were not involved.
There is a huge fire cloud visible from space.
NASA and other entities are constantly looking for comets or asteroids that could cause a crater on Earth's surface. Scientists haven't found anything to worry about yet. Losiak believes studies such as hers will benefit from proper disaster preparation.
She said that the study improves our understanding of environmental effects. She said that they would be able to more precisely determine the size and type of evacuated area.
Recent large impact events have been recorded. One of the most famous examples is the Tunguska event, which destroyed roughly 770 square miles of the forest.
The Russian city of Chelyabinsk was the site of a small body explosion. There were thousands of people injured due to glass and other debris.
Losiak and her team will be going to another set of small impact craters in Argentina in late September to follow up on the research.
Losiak said that they would collect more data and samples in order to find more organisms killed by the asteroids. Campo del Cielo has impact craters where asteroids exploded when they hit the ground, but also funnels.
When an asteroid slows down in the atmosphere, a penetration funnel happens. The researchers say that this formation happens when it is hitting the ground at a high rate of speed.
The temperatures and pressures experienced by the ground are less extreme in this case. She said the goal is to compare the craters and the funnels in the same area.
The study was published in the journal Geology.
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