Scientists of the Copenhagen University called the possible reason for the sudden explosion of biodiversity of 469 million years, in the Ordalic period, when the sea of land was populated by trilobites, brachiopods and condontes. Marine biodiversity increased four times in just a few million years, but researchers have denied the version according to which this happened due to intense bombardment by meteorites. This is reported in an article published in the Nature Communications magazine.
According to one of the popular hypotheses, the explosion of biodiversity in the Orda period occurred due to the destruction of the asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, which caused the long-term bombing of the Earth by meteorites. This, in turn, led to an emission of a large amount of dust and global cooling in the atmosphere. According to scientists, it is low temperatures that contributed to the outbreak of biodiversity. However, in the new work, the researchers showed that cooling occurred long before the space catastrophe – for 600 thousand years.
Specialists analyzed the fossils of the ancient sedimentary layers of the seabed in Stainsodden in the south of Norway. It turned out that meteorite bombardment led to the opposite effect, that is, biodiversity stagnation on Earth. Dust blocked the sunlight, which broke the majority of photosynthetic processes and, as a result, the living conditions of animals in general.
The authors of scientific work have advanced a new hypothesis explaining the outbreak of biodiversity. The formation of ice hats on the planet could change the orbital parameters of the Earth, namely the slope, rotation and configuration of the orbit itself around the sun. It caused a long-term establishment of a colder climate and, as a result, the flourishing of marine species on Earth.