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Friday, September 6, 2013

Evidence Found for Planet-Cooling Asteroid 12,900 Years Ago

The dust refuses to settle on a debate about whether asteroid impacts caused one of Earth’s most famous cold snaps 12,900 years ago.

The latest evidence in the contentious discussion comes in the form of pieces of bedrock from Quebec, Canada, that seem to have been blasted out as far as Pennsylvania. “I’d say there’s evidence of an impact happening, for sure,” says Mukul Sharma, an isotope geochemist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and co-author of a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.