The largest asteroid breakup in three billion years
A 150-kilometre asteroid shatters in the belt, and Earth is pelted with debris for millions of years.
- When
- Known to
- ± 2 million years
- Era
- Ordovician, Paleozoic
About 466 million years ago the L-chondrite parent body is destroyed in a collision, the largest such breakup recorded in Earth's geology for the past three billion years. Fossil meteorites appear in Swedish limestone in extraordinary numbers, and impact craters cluster in the same interval. Roughly a third of all meteorites falling today still come from this single event.