Big news from the recent Lunar and Planetary Conference at the Woodlands in Texas. A excited article from the BBC breaks the cool story.
A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research. The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores. The event would have been similar to the Tunguska event, which flattened a large area of Siberian forest in 1908.
As the article properly notes, there is a an interesting twist to these incredibly violent episodes — they are damn hard to detect thousands (or even hundreds) of years after they occur. What seems important here, as with Younger Dryas Boundary discovery, is that they are indeed nevertheless detectable.
It is fun to see these events finally being resolved in the geological record.
More later…
