It is barely credible that only two decades ago geoscientists who argued that extraterrestrial impacts had once had an important role in Earth history met with scorn from many of their peers; slightly mad, even bad and perhaps dangerous to know. Yet clear evidence for impacts has grown steadily, especially in the time before 2.5 billion years ago known as the Archaean (see EPN for March 2003 , April 2005, July 2012 , May 2014). Even in the 1990s, when it should have been clear from the golden years of lunar exploration that our neighbour had been battered at the outset of the Archaean, claims for terrestrial evidence of the tail-end of that cataclysmic event were eyed askance. Now, one of the pioneer researchers into the oldest terrestrial impacts, Don Lowe of Stanford University, California has, with two colleagues, reported finds of yet more impact-related spherule beds from the famous Archaean repository of the Barberton Mountains in South Africa (Lowe, D.R. et al. 2014. Recently discovered 3.42-3.23 Ga impact layers, Barberton Belt, South Africa: 3.8 Ga detrital zircons, Archaean impact history and tectonic implications. Geology, v. 42, p. 747-750).
Like four other such layers at Barberton, those newly described contain several types of spherules, degraded to microcrystalline alteration products of the original glasses. Some of them contain clear evidence of originally molten droplets having welded together on deposition. Their contrasted geochemistry reveals target rocks ranging in composition from well-sorted quartz sands to intermediate, mafic and ultramafic igneous rocks. Some beds are overlain by chaotic deposits familiar from more recent times as products of tsunamis, with signs that the spherules themselves had been picked up and transported.
Dated by their stratigraphic relations to local felsic igneous rocks, the spherule beds arrived in pulses over a period of about 240 Ma between 3.42 to 3.23 Ga. Even more interesting, the overlying tsunami beds have yielded transported zircons that extend back to 3.8 Ga spanning the Archaean history of the Kaapvaal craton of which the Barberton greenstone belt rests and indeed that of many Eoarchaean cratons; the Earth’s oldest tangible continental crust. The zircons may reflect the depth to which the impacts penetrated, possibly the base of the continental crust. It isn’t easy to judge the size of the responsible impactors from the available evidence, but Lowe and colleagues suggest that they were much larger than that which closed the Mesozoic at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary; perhaps of the order of 20-70 km across. So, although the late, heavy bombardment of the Moon seems to have closed at around 3.8 Ga, from evidence yielded by the Apollo programme, until at least half a billion years later large objects continued to hit the Earth more often than expected from the lunar record. Lowe has suggested that this tail-end of major bombardment on Earth may eventually have triggered the onset of plate tectonics as we know it now.
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