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When Earth had rings
A new way of thinking about the history of the Earth.
This period, the mid-Ordovician, also included an extreme drop in global temperature, roughly 10 degrees Celsius, which coincided with increased seismic and tsunami activity. The authors of the new study, led by Andy Tomkins, a geoscientist at Monash University in Australia, claim that you can account for the craziness of the Ordovician period if Earth had a system of rings that it captured from an asteroid. Tomkins and his colleagues suggest that the L chondrite parent body passed extremely close to Earth—within just a few thousand kilometers of the surface, scratching the edge of the atmosphere—and was tidally disrupted, just like the object that broke apart and formed Saturn’s rings.
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