Many of you must have seen the strange faces on the surface of Earth when you look at it with a naked eye.
Go closer with binoculars or with a telescope and you will see that the strange faces are nothing but the remains of asteroid and comet collisions on its surface.
I earlier told you that we can imagine the Solar System as a battle field with comets and asteroids as the bullets and rockets that are continually fired towards Earth.
We see the impact of such bullets and rockets on Moon in plenty. Then the question that comes in the mind is that how these space are bombs missing a much bigger target than the Moon…?
Is our Earth lucky enough? The answer is No! And the reason is that Earth is also bombarded by these space bombs and we still see some marks on the face of our planet. The best for all the asteroid researchers is the famous Arizona crater that now is more of a tourist place.
But still we don’t find as much evidence as we find on Earth. We account this to the atmosphere of Earth. Moon has no atmosphere that can bring a climatic change on it. To the contrary Earth has a good atmosphere that provides the planet an ability to heal itself.
Earthquakes, Volcanic Eruptions and heavy rain etc can all change the landscape of the planet and have already hidden many scars that Earth has as evidences of asteroid and comet collisions.
We can also use the Moon as an Evidence Plate of the Earth. Since it has no atmosphere we can still see the impacts of some of the biggest space bombs on the face of Moon.
When man landed on Moon the astronauts returned deep-drill core samples from three different sites on the Moon. The cores drilled more than 2 meters into the lunar regolith.
The deepest samples were some 2 billion years old and were almost unchanged since they were laid down. They also showed that the composition particles from the Solar wind has changed drastically and is not the same as it was 2 billion years ago. No theory has till now given a clear answer to this weird phenomenon.
Another question is that what happened on Earth millions of years ago that caused the mass extinction of more than half of all life types. The best theory is the famous K-T extinction that suggests that some 65-million years ago a 10KM wide asteroid slammed into Earth creating a devastating climatic change that completely destroyed all major life forms that were on the planet.
The ground zero of the impact is thought to be Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as the Chicxulub Crater that is some 160 KM across.
Another theory says that such impacts occur periodically and after every 26 million years ago. This means that if we consider the K-T extinction to be true then the Earth has another 13 million years before another such impact destroys life on Earth.
Via: redorbit
