News in Brief Earth

Huge space rock rattled Earth 3 billion years ago

Asteroid left traces in South Africa’s Barberton greenstone belt

SPACE ROCKS  The size of the asteroid that may have killed the dinosaurs (Chicxulub) and even Mount Everest look tiny compared to a space rock that may have slammed into Earth 3.26 billion years ago. 

AGU

By Ashley Yeager

An asteroid almost as wide as Rhode Island may have plowed into Earth 3.26 billion years ago, leaving a trace in South Africa’s Barberton greenstone belt. Hitting the planet at a speed of 20 kilometers per second, the 37- to 58-kilometer-wide space rock could have jolted Earth with at least the force of a magnitude 10.8 earthquake and set off tsunamis thousands of meters high, researchers report April 14 in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. It is the first time scientists have calculated the scale of the impact and its effects on Earth. 

A version of this article appears in the May 17, 2014 issue of Science News.

About Ashley Yeager

Ashley Yeager is the associate news editor at Science News. She has worked at The Scientist, the Simons Foundation, Duke University and the W.M. Keck Observatory, and was the web producer for Science News from 2013 to 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.

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