Charcoal-Like Asteroid Burns Living Things Without Wildfire's Help

The charred remains of microorganisms killed by even a moderate asteroid impact can reveal the extent of cosmic crash damage.

Four craters that were formed thousands of years apart and are located in Estonia, Poland, and Canada were analyzed by a study team. The team discovered millimeter- to centimeter-sized particles of charcoal mixed in with the material generated after each of these strikes, the authors wrote, despite the distance in geography and the interval in time between them.

The research's findings were published on August 31 in the journal Geology.

Charcoal-Like Asteroid Burns Species

Study lead author Anna Losiak, who works at the Institute of Geological Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences, told Space.com that the charcoal was created from species killed, cooked and buried by the asteroid.

The team's dominant notion for a long time was that the charcoal associated with typical wildfires was similar to the ancient asteroid-battered animals discovered.

She continued, saying that impact-formed charcoal is "far more homogenous and indicates to a lower temperature of creation" than wildfire-formed charcoal.

She said that the impact charcoal discovered in the craters was comparable to, but not exactly the same as, charcoal produced when the wood is mixed with pyroclastic flows from erupting volcanoes.

Around every 200 years, the smaller impact craters that Losiak studies-those that are only up to 656 feet (200 meters) in diameter-form, offering countless opportunities to learn more about the conditions that led to their formation, according to her.

However, she has a specific area of interest. Most people are interested in gigantic collisions because those are capable of causing planet-scale damage - the diminishment of dinosaurs is the best.

So far, the only example of this kind of event, she said, alluded to the asteroid event that caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Wildfires Not Involved At All

The mystery charcoal was first discovered by Losiak in Estonia, close to a minor impact crater. As a recently graduated Ph.D., she started working at a summer school program. A year later, she returned to lead a project to discover and analyze the "paleosoil." She explained that paleosoil is an old soil coated with debris taken out of the crater during its formation.

In the end, the team failed to locate the paleosoil. But after three days of laborious hand digging, which was required for environmental protection, her crew discovered charcoal.

She explained that the team wondered why there would be so many sizable wildfires just before the construction of four distinct impact craters that were generated over a period of thousands of years and in geographically dissimilar locations.

As a result, the team made the decision to look into the matter further, evaluate the characteristics of the charcoal fragments discovered mixed in with the debris ejected from craters, and contrast it with charcoal from wildfires. The team discovered at that point that there were no wildfires at all.

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