A team of American researchers believes they found evidence of a comet that slammed into the Earth about 10 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct -- at the Jersey Shore.
The impact would have created a period with the closest climate to our current man-made global warming, scientists say.
Comet file photo
In a paper published in "Science Magazine" last week, the researchers detail their discovery of tiny spherical specimens below the ocean off the coast of the Garden State. The team says this discovery is proof of a comet strike, which would have rapidly increased global temperatures and thrown off the Earth's carbon cycle.
One of the co-authors of the paper Dennis Kent, who is a researcher at Rutgers University and Columbia University, told NPR he believes this "raises the possibility and probability" of an impact around the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred about 56 million years ago. The event is often mentioned in the current conversation involving global warming since it was the last time temperatures rose rapidly due to CO2 levels.
The comet would have been 6.2 miles wide.
"The fact that it occurred just at the time of the PETM is either an amazing coincidence, or it says there may be some close correlation, there may be some causation involved," Kent said in an article in the Chicago Tribune.
Kent previously penned a paper in 2003 that made the case for a comet strike triggering a greenhouse warming event. The study used samples taken from drill sites in Clayton, Ancora and the Bass River in New Jersey.
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The new evidence, which the researchers say was created by a crater, doesn't mean the comet hit in New Jersey or anywhere nearby, Kent tells NPR.