Aussie impacts pushed the Roman Empire off the edge
Space rocks that smashed into the water just off Australia could have accelerated the demise of the Roman Empire.
That's one of the things I love about science the most - cause and effect. A cause can have the strangest effect.
Recent research indicates pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed Down Under about 1,500 years ago.
The new work is the latest among several clues linking a major impact event to an episode of global cooling that affected crop harvests from 536- 545.
According to the theory, material thrown high into the atmosphere by the strike probably triggered the cooling, which has been pinpointed in tree-ring data from Asia and Europe.
What's more, around the same time the Roman Empire was falling apart in Europe, Aborigines in Australia may have witnessed and recorded the impact.
Aboriginal rock art from the region seems to have recorded the meteorite, although the researchers examining this art are keeping stum until after their paper has been published.
The extreme weather events of 535 and beyond were the most severe and protracted short-term episodes of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2,000 years.
For more details, click here.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
The Empire collapsed in AD 476 and it definitely wasn't the result of an asteroid!