Giant Impact

Here is something that is just mind boggling

Geologist from Stanford Unisversity have discovered and mapped a huge impact from an asteroid that was belived to be bigger than the one that killed all of the dinosaurs. This thing was gargantuan, 23 to 36 mile wide and speeing toward Earth at speeds up to 12 miles per second and the impact happened over 3.26 billion years ago. Which would have been in the Archean period, right on the edge of the mesoarchean period.

This asteriod is thought to have change the Earth in such ways as creating the plate technonics that we see today. This asteriod collision had enough energy to be able to reach all the way down the lithosphere and cause the plates to ove enought to change how they act. When the plates only move centimetters a year under normal conditions. That amount of energy is with out fathom. On top of all the earthquakes that happened afterward there were huge tsunamis.

The evidance from this impact was discovered in the Barberton greenstone belt sits east of Johannesburg near the border with Swaziland in southern Africa. The model provides evidence for the rock formations and crustal fractures that scientists have discovered in the Barberton greenstone belt, said Frank Kyte, a geologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

This research is all in effort to understand the Earth as it was forming and how life has evolved to what is it today.