Apparently, we don’t just have to worry about a sizeable chunk of rock and ice hurtling toward us in space. We could be severely affected (or killed off outright) even just by its debris field:
An hour-long hailstorm from space bombarded the Earth 13,000 years ago - plunging the planet into a mini-ice age, scientists claimed today.
The catastrophe was caused by a disintegrating comet and saw the planet sprayed by thousands of frozen boulders made of ice and dust.
The collisions wiped out huge numbers of animal species all over the world, disrupted the lives of our stone age ancestors and triggered a freeze that lasted more than 1,000 years.
[…]
The change in climate caused retreating glaciers to advance once again, and coincided with the extinction of 35 families of North American mammals.
[…]
Professor Napier's theory suggests the devastation took place when the Earth strayed into a dense trail of fragments shed by a large comet.
Thousands of chunks of material from the comet would have rained down on Earth, each one releasing the energy of a one megaton nuclear bomb.
The impacts would have filled the atmosphere with smoke and soot and blotting out the Sun.
Prof Napier says a comet swooped into the inner solar system between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago and has been breaking apart ever since.
'A large comet has been disintegrating in the near-Earth environment for the past 20,000 to 30,000 years and running into thousands of fragments from this comet is a much more likely event than a single collision,' said Professor Napier.
Amazing and chilling.
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