Did a Prehistoric Asteroid Breakup Shower Earth With Enough Dust To Change the Climate?

Applehu Akbar writes: CNN reports this week on a paper describing a hypothesis that the breakup of a large asteroid 466 million years ago generated enough dust in Earth’s orbit to substantially change the terrestrial climate for an extended period. This would have triggered an ‘Ordovician icehouse’ climate event, with major effects on biology. “The 93-mile-wide asteroid was in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter when it collided with something else and broke apart, creating a wealth of dust that flooded the inner solar system…” CNN reports. “To understand how this process unfolded, the researchers found evidence of space dust locked in 466-million-year-old rocks that were once on the sea floor.” The paper argues that to this day, that collision “still delivers almost a third of all meteorites falling on Earth.”