Dinosaurs aren’t the only animals that might have gone extinct after disasters such as the crash of a space rock into Earth.
New research suggests wooly mammoths, the gigantic cousins of modern elephants, also died out as a result of climate change following a cosmic impact—and that blast may have shocked human populations as well.
Wooly mammoths once shook the earth beneath their feet, sending humans scurrying. But then something much larger shook the Earth itself, according to the findings.
An electron microscope image of a carbon spherule from Sheriden Cave. (Photo courtesy K. Tankersley)
Either a comet scraping the atmosphere or a meteorite slamming into the Earth caused global-scale combustion, scorching the air, melting bedrock and altered the course of Earth’s history, according to researcher Kenneth Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati.
That, he proposes, was the last gasp of the Great Ice Age.
“Imagine living in a time when you look outside and there are elephants walking around in Cincinnati,” Tankersley said. “But by the time you’re at the end of your years, there are no more elephants. It happens within your lifetime.” Tankersley and colleagues describe evidence for the event, estimated to have occurred and to have affected at least four continents about 12,800 years ago, in the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The climate changed rapidly and profoundly” after the incident, he said. “Coinciding with this very rapid global climate change was mass extinctions.”
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