An enormous meteorite, four times Mount Everest’s size, struck Earth 3.26 billion years ago, possibly setting the stage for life to emerge.
About 3.26 billion years ago, an enormous meteorite, believed to be four times taller than Mount Everest, collided with Earth, potentially paving the way for the origins of early life. This groundbreaking theory, detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was proposed by Harvard geologist Nadja Drabon and her research team. The team suggests that this enormous impact may have acted as a “super fertilizer” for primitive life forms.
This meteorite, thought to be 50 to 200 times larger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, hit Earth during the Paleoarchean Era when most of the planet was covered by oceans, with very few land masses and no atmospheric or oceanic oxygen.
Analysis of ancient rock samples from South Africa’s Barberton Greenstone Belt reveals that life rebounded remarkably quickly after the impact, even thriving in its aftermath—underscoring the resilience of Earth’s earliest life forms.