Prehistoric life
Impact events, proposed as causes of mass extinction, are when the planet is struck by a comet or meteor large enough to create a huge shockwave felt around the globe. Widespread dust and debris rain down, disrupting the climate and causing extinction on a global, rather than local, scale. The demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous has been linked to an impact that left a crater in the seabed off the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Impacts have also been blamed for other mass extinctions, but the timing and links between cause and effect for these is still debated by scientists.
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Domination to extinction
Everything on Earth was affected following the asteroid impact.
Everything on Earth was affected following the asteroid impact.
Permian meteor strike
Was there a Permian strike big enough to devastate life on Earth?
Evidence of a meteor strike can be found in Permian quartz, but it doesn't suggest a large enough impact event to have wiped out 95% of life on Earth on its own. This programme was first shown in 2002.
End of the Cretaceous
A massive comet crash spells disaster for the giant dinosaurs.
A massive comet crash spells disaster for the giant dinosaurs.
An impact event is the collision of an asteroid, comet, meteoroid, or other celestial object with another celestial object such as Earth. Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events (and exploding bolides) have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant localised consequences. There have also been major impact events throughout the Earth's history which severely disrupted the environment and caused mass extinctions. Impact craters are the result of impact events on solid objects and as the dominant landforms on many of the System's solid objects and provide the most solid evidence of prehistoric events.
Notable impact events include the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which occurred 65 million years ago and led to the demise of the dinosaurs. That event is associated with a large meteorite impact that created the Chicxulub crater around the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. One of the best-known recorded impacts in modern times was the Tunguska event, which occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor event is the only known such event to result in a large number of casualties, and the Chelyabinsk meteor is the largest recorded object to have encountered the Earth since the Tunguska event. The most notable non-terrestrial event is the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact, which provided the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects, when the comet broke apart and collided with Jupiter in July 1994. Impact events have been a plot and background element in science fiction since knowledge of real impacts became established in the scientific mainstream.
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Ediacaran period
Devonian period
Triassic period
Jurassic period
Cretaceous period
Eocene epoch
Miocene epoch
Late Devonian mass extinction
Permian mass extinction
Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction
Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction