Around 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere got cold — really cold — in an abrupt climate change crisis called the Younger Dryas event. Now, researchers have found evidence that suggests that the sudden catastrophe may have been caused by a comet.
Reporting their results in a study in PLOS One, the researchers identified geochemical signatures in deep-sea sediments from Baffin Bay, off the coast of Greenland, which indicate that the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere’s air and ocean may have come from a collision with a comet as it disintegrated.
“Collisions of the Earth with comets led to catastrophes, leading to climate change, to the death of civilizations. One of these events was a catastrophe that occurred about 12,800 years ago,” said Vladimir Tselmovich, a study author from the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to a press release. “Having studied in detail the microscopic traces of this disaster in ...
