In the case that a doomsday asteroid hits Earth, researchers say that we have the assurance that life on Earth will bounce back or rather, fall back to Earth after the initial impact.
Steinn Sigurdsson and colleagues conducted a computer simulation of a massive asteroid said to potential wipe all life on Earth. But hold your horses because this doesn't necessarily mean all life will become extinct and the Earth would be blasted to oblivion.
"If you have a sterilizing impact — if you have a beyond dinosaur killer, something that’s going to flash fry the entire planet — there is a significant probability that some biota is ejected and returns to the planet, hopefully gently, fast enough to reseed the planet," he added.
The existence of such "space refuges" is supported by computer simulations Sigurðsson and his colleagues recently performed, which tracked the trajectories of rock blasted off Earth and the other rocky planets into orbit around the sun.
They added that what caused the dinosaurs' extinction 66 million years ago might have been a global firestorm that blazed through the surface of the Earth as the rocks were falling back to Earth.
(Image credit: TBIT/Pixabay)
sounds about right
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I thought the aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens eruption made it clear that a lot of life could survive a cataclysm just by hiding in depressions or burrows, even without resorting to hiding in orbit. And there were a lot of relatively large flora and fauna that survived through the end of the dinosaurs that clearly did just that.What's more interesting about this article is that it supports the possibility of microbial life surviving in space for more extended periods -- raising the question of whether life on Earth and Mars may have mutually seeded each other a billion or more years ago. And who knows, maybe even Venus.
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