SCIENCE BRIEFING
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
A heavy bombardment by asteroids the size of Ireland was not enough to wipe out life on Earth 3.9 billion years ago, researchers said this week in a finding that turns back the clock of life by 500 million years.
Many scientists had thought the violent pelting by massive asteroids during the period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment would have melted the Earth’s crust and vaporized any life on the planet.
But new three-dimensional computer models developed by a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that much of Earth’s crust, and the microbes living on it, could have survived and may even have thrived. The report appeared in the journal Nature.
