AS IF gouging a huge crater and throwing up vast dust clouds wasn’t bad enough, large meteorite impacts may punch right through the Earth’s crust, triggering gigantic volcanic eruptions.
The idea is controversial, but evidence is mounting that the Earth’s geology has largely been driven by such events. This would also explain why our planet has so few impact crater remnants. Counting the number of asteroids we see in the sky suggests that over the past 250 million years, Earth should have been hit around 440 times by asteroids larger than one kilometre across. But scientists have found only 38 large impact craters from this period.…
