Asteroid Collisions Could Help Combat Climate Change but at a Heavy Price %

Scientists have a bizarre solution for climate change, the only problem is that may kill us all.

We all know that the collision of meteorites and asteroids on Earth can have devastating consequences; however, what about collisions in space? Leading research at Lund University, Nuclear Physicist Birger Schmitz and his team investigated that 466 million years ago, an asteroid collision in space generated enough dust to result in an ice age on Earth. Gathering evidence from a study on fossil meteorites, the team found that the 93-mile wide asteroid collided with an unidentified fast moving object between Jupiter and Mars producing extraterrestrial dust that accumulated in the next millions of years.

This extraterrestrial dust functioned as a protective layer and blocked the solar radiation from reaching Earth. In the time span of millions of years, the dust accumulated on the surface of Earth and helped it cool gradually. Thanks to this gradual cooling process, the plants and animals on Earth were able to slowly adapt to the drop in temperatures without species going into extinction.

In order to tackle the problem of climate change, scientists worldwide have suggested the use of the same principle that happened millions of years ago, the collision of an asteroid in space. They suggested that an asteroid could be captured and placed between the Lagrange points of the Earth and the Sun. Lagrange point is the unstable area where the gravitational pull of Earth and the Sun are equal, leading to the shattering of the asteroid. The dust produced would then block solar radiation from reaching Earth.

The uncertainty in this procedure is that the asteroid could possibly collide with Earth wiping out an entire city. Even if the use of asteroid collisions to slow down climate change is questionable, this discovery proves that sometimes in order to understand the mechanisms on Earth, scientists will have to search outside of its surface.