Studies of an ice core taken from East Antarctica's Dome Fuji reveal evidence of two meteoritic events that took place around 434,000 and 481,000 years ago. Keiji Misawa of Japan's National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo and his colleagues report their discovery of silicate-rich dust layers. Analysis of the dust indicated an extraterrestrial source.
The dust layers, which are a few millimetres thick, are similar to those found in another core drilled about 2,000 kilometres to the east. The authors say that this massive spread of debris came from large impacts, evidence of which has not previously been found in the Southern Hemisphere.
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Geoscience: Extraterrestrial dust. Nature 463, 138 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/463138e
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/463138e
