Earth and Moon impact flux increased at the end of the Paleozoic
Impact rates on Earth and the Moon
The rate at which impacts produce craters on the Moon is used to calibrate ages in planetary science. Earth should also have received similar numbers of impacts, but many craters have been hidden by erosion, ice sheets, and so on. Mazrouei et al. used infrared images of the Moon to estimate the ages of young lunar craters (see the Perspective by Koeberl). They found that the impact rate increased within the past ∼500 million years, a conclusion strengthened by an analysis of known impact craters on Earth. Crater size distributions are the same on Earth and the Moon over this period, implying that terrestrial erosion affects all craters equally, regardless of their size.
Abstract
The terrestrial impact crater record is commonly assumed to be biased, with erosion thought to eliminate older craters, even on stable terrains. Given that the same projectile population strikes Earth and the Moon, terrestrial selection effects can be quantified by using a method to date lunar craters with diameters greater than 10 kilometers and younger than 1 billion years. We found that the impact rate increased by a factor of 2.6 about 290 million years ago. The terrestrial crater record shows similar results, suggesting that the deficit of large terrestrial craters between 300 million and 650 million years ago relative to more recent times stems from a lower impact flux, not preservation bias. The almost complete absence of terrestrial craters older than 650 million years may indicate a massive global-scale erosion event near that time.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S6
Tables S1 and S2
Data File S1
Resources
References and Notes
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Volume 363 | Issue 6424
18 January 2019
18 January 2019
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Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
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Received: 3 November 2017
Accepted: 5 December 2018
Published in print: 18 January 2019
Acknowledgments
We thank M. Schmeider and C. Koeberl for helpful discussions regarding ages of terrestrial craters, T. Hincks for her help generating the plots in Fig. 4 and fig. S5, and J. Husson for providing digital Precambrian bedrock outlines shown in Fig. 4. We thank P. F. Hoffman, C. B. Keller, and R. N. Mitchell for stimulating discussions concerning Cryogenian erosion. We also thank the anonymous referees for their useful and constructive comments. Funding: S.M.’s and R.R.G.’s work on this study were funded by a Discovery grant from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada to R.R.G.; W.F.B.’s participation was supported by NASA’s SSERVI program “Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets (ISET)” through institute grant NNA14AB03A. A.H.P.’s participation was supported in part by NASA’s SSERVI program “Project for Exploration Science Pathfinder Research for Enhancing Solar System Observations (Project ESPRESSO)” through institute grant 80ARC0M0008. T.M.G. acknowledges funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council, grant NE/R004978/1. Author contributions: R.R.G. conceived the lunar crater experiments and supervised data collection. S.M. collected lunar crater data. Statistical tests were performed by A.H.P. Expertise on asteroid evolution and impact probabilities was provided by W.F.B. Expertise on kimberlite pipes was provided by T.M.G. All authors (S.M, R.R.G., W.F.B, A.H.P., and T.M.G.) analyzed the results and wrote the manuscript. Competing interests. The authors have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: The LRO Diviner data used in this paper can be obtained from (23). The derived lunar crater data are provided in table S1, and the terrestrial crater data used [updated from (24)] are provided in table S2. The kimberlite database [updated from (25)] used to generate Fig. 4 and fig. S5 is provided in supplementary data file S1 (aar4058_s1). The Approximate Bayesian Computation rejection (ABCr) code and the counting area simulation code (used to generate fig. S4) are available at https://github.com/ghentr/Earth-Moon_flux.
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