A Comet Collision May Have Triggered Earth’s Ancient Warming Period

Scientists have located the first ever physical evidence that a giant asteroid or comet collided with Earth nearly 56 million years ago. It is the same time when Earth experienced an abrupt warming period. Both events occurring at the same time is quite tantalizing for the researchers. It indicates that this clash may have been the major influencing factor for Earth's ancient temperature rise and studying the previous warming events and pattern could possibly help scientists understand the present warming climate better.

The researchers laid hands on tiny glass spheres, called spherules, found inside ocean rocks along the US East Coast. Detailed thoroughly in Journal Science, these spherules are being believed to be leftovers from the massive collision, rock debris that the asteroid or comet ejected when it collided with Earth.

"There's never really been any firm physical evidence of that happening," said study author Morgan Schaller, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, according to The Verge. "But this is the first evidence of an impact at this time for sure."

Experts had suggested earlier as well that a comet or asteroid collision may have caused Earth's historic warming period, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. That event might have changed the entire atmosphere and environment of Earth, leading to some mass extinctions. The exact reason of the event has always remained a mystery and the discovery of this new evidence doesn't give any justifications too but the occurrence of two peculiar events around the same time definitely points towards a possible association between the collision and rising temperatures.

"This is a major event in Earth's history, and finding something like this is a major discovery if it holds up," Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was not involved in the study, told The Verge. "It provides a big clue in the chain of discovery that we need to solve that mystery."

The discovery of spherules came as a huge surprise to the team of researchers because they weren't actually looking for any evidence related to this massive collision. They were searching for tiny, single-celled, fossilized creatures known as foraminifera that are found in ancient marine rocks.

This sudden discovery led the scientists to figure out the huge release of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and oceans 56 million years ago leading to a rise in global temperatures between 9 and 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today's increasing temperatures are associated with human activities, like the burning of fossil fuels and use of chloro-floro-carbons. Ancient changes caused death to an asteroid or comet collision but the scope of current warming patterns isn't far behind. If we look at the geological history, humans should probably be compared to asteroids.