Terada, and two co-authors, reported in 2020 that well-known meteoroid bombardment of the Earth-Moon system must have caused even more catastrophic damage to the terrestrial ecosphere during the Late Precambrian than previously thought by geoscientists. However, ancient meteoroid impacts and their relations to environmental changes are not well understood because of erosion and/or resurfacing processes on Earth.
The authors investigated the formation ages of 59 lunar craters with fresh morphologies and diameters greater than approximately 20 km and first find that 8 of 59 craters were formed simultaneously on the Moon. Considering the radiometric ages of ejecta from Copernicus crater and impact glass spherules from various Apollo landing sites, we conclude that sporadic meteoroid bombardment occurred across the whole Moon at approximately 800 Ma. Based on crater scaling laws and collision probabilities with the Earth and Moon, the authors concluded that at least (4–5) × 1016 kg of meteoroids, approximately 30–60 times more than the Chicxulub impact, must have plunged into the Earth-Moon system immediately before the Cryogenian period of the Late Precambrian, which was an era of great environmental changes.
After some 400 Ma later and since the 541 Ma Cambrian biodiversity explosion, mass extinction events have occurred at least five times (the so-called Big five events)1, and extra-terrestrial impacts are considered a potential cause of some of them (e.g., Ordovician–Silurian, Devonian, and Late Permian, Late Triassic and Cretaceous-Palaeogene extinctions), the latter competing with contributions by the flood basalt eruption-related hypotheses (that occurred over large parts of northern Russia).
See Figure 3, and the other figures and discussion in the article.
For the list of impact craters >15 km diameter on the Moon, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17115-6/tables/1
For the list of possible impact crater on Earth, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_structures_on_Earth
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