Kind: captions
Language: en
Craters are a reminder of our solar
systems formation around 4.56 billion
years ago.
It began as a disc of dust and gas in
orbit around [music] the young sun.
The solid materials collided and clumped
together to gradually form the rocky
planets.
As a result of the formation of the
earth, there were still lots of debris
and asteroids and and other smaller
objects flying around the sun.
Those object kept colliding with the
surface of the earth.
About 4 and a half billion years ago, a
single object the size of Mars or even
bigger may have crashed into the young
Earth.
This highresolution simulation reveals
how the collision flung enough molten
and vaporized [music]
debris into space to create the moon.
I'm trying to understand the early
evolution of the earth and the effects
of all those impacts that were taking
place uh during the idea on earth. So we
do this by building models.
One of the most important sources of
data comes from NASA's lunar
reconnaissance mission.
This robotic spacecraft has made a 3D
map of the moon's surface at extremely
high resolution.
The first thing that we do is to look at
[music] the surface of the moon. It is
much older than the surface of the
earth. The surface of the moon is full
of impact craters. All the impact
craters. And so we can use that
information by mapping how many there
are and their sizes and their ages.
[music] And that will provide us the
primary information that we need to
build our [music] models.
>> It took an international team decades to
collect the data, but they finally
created a computer model that took what
happened on the moon during the hadian
and simulated the asteroids that would
have hit the earth during the same
stretch of time.
And the outcome of that first modeling
was staggering.
We are seeing the uh entire surface of
the earth that is strongly affected by
impacts. Every single circle that you
see here is is an impact is a collision.
The prediction was that there were a
tremendous number of impacts, even large
one. Imagine an object the size of the
moon that [music] could have collided
with the Earth.
That would have basically wiped out
almost entirely perhaps the the oceans,
vaporized the oceans and melted a large
portion of the crust of the Earth.
This series of apocalyptic bombardments
might look like it created a chaotic
hellscape on Earth. Even during asteroid
impacts, there must have been enough
habitable conditions somewhere on the
planet for life to get a foothold.