Study of Ancient Craters Suggests Earth Once Had a Saturn-Like Ring

The ring could be responsible for a prolonged drop in temperatures millions of years ago.

That is why other studies indicate that the Earth could once have had an extensive ring of space debris around it similar to the rings of Saturn, which would have resulted in intense meteorite impacts on the planet’s surface.

This hypothesized ring most probably coalesced around 466 million years ago when a gargantuan asteroid was being pulled asunder by the tidal forces exerted by the Earth after the latter had gotten within the Roche limit of the former. Nestled around the Earth’s equator, the ring altered may have helped cool the planet by preventing the Sun’s light from penetrating while at the same time pummeling the planet with meteors. The results were reported in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters on September 16.

‘Pieces from this ring littered the Earth over millions of years, and this caused a significant rise in meteorite strikes as seen in geology data set’ said, the study’s author and a planetary science expert, Andy Tomkins from Monash University in Australia. We also discovered that in sedimentary matter of this age, the amount of meteorite fragments is higher than normal.

The researchers premised their hypothesis on the Ordovician period which was roughly between 485 million to 443 million years ago when the Earth was going through one of the harsh climatic times coupled with increased cases of meteorite impacts. To examine the cause, researchers plotted twenty one impact craters from Ordovician age and all of them are within 30 degrees latitude from the equator.

As I mentioned earlier, due to only 30% of continental crust lying in this region, the chances were nil that all these impacts were random – or as improbable as throwing a three-sided die twenty-one times and getting always a three.

So with such long shots, the researchers claimed that a ring debris around the Earth’s equator, the remnants of the broken asteroid once explained both the equatorial strikes and the cooling climate.

Nevertheless, the researchers admit that more evidence is needed to validate this theory; however, such rings may have occurred in the prehistoric history of the Earth and emerged only occasionally before gradually disappearing as they drained their material through regional gravity.

Tomkins added, ‘it was provocative that a ring system could have played a role on the issue of global temperatures, thus raising a new facet of extraterrestrial impacts on Earth’s climate’.

Do not forget to share your opinion with us to provide you with the best posts !