--- title: Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say | TIME description: Giant rocks from space are falling from the sky more than they used to, but don’t worry. For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years. canonical: https://time.com/video/m2t8SP0V/ og:title: Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say og:description: Giant rocks from space are falling from the sky more than they used to, but don’t worry. For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years. og:url: https://time.com/video/m2t8SP0V/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/m2t8SP0V/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say twitter:description: Giant rocks from space are falling from the sky more than they used to, but don’t worry. For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/m2t8SP0V/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say [Watch (HLS stream): Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/m2t8SP0V.m3u8) (1:45)  _Published 2019-01-18. Giant rocks from space are falling from the sky more than they used to, but don’t worry. For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years._ --- Jul 28, 2023 3:16 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Asteroid Expected to Pass Extremely Close to Earth Sunday](/video/3O1rZ9xX/) ### Asteroid Expected to Pass Extremely Close to Earth Sunday [‘City Killer’ Sized Asteroids Might Hit Earth More Frequently Than Previously Thought](/video/67dF3kd8/) ### ‘City Killer’ Sized Asteroids Might Hit Earth More Frequently Than Previously Thought [TIME Explains: An Asteroid Buzzes the Earth](/video/TgSKV2RZ/) ### TIME Explains: An Asteroid Buzzes the Earth --- ## Transcript So our team used a new method to date craters on the Moon. And we did this by looking at the rock abundance that surrounds craters. So when you look at the Moon in temperature, what you find is that big rocks Stay warmer through the lunar night than sort of the background dirt and other things you have. It's sort of like going to the beach, right. If you stand on the sand in the sun, it's very hot. And then as night goes down, the sand gets cool very quickly, but the rocks stay warm through the night. You can temperature as a way to tell you how many rocks exist on the moon. We've found the fresh craters, or young craters, have lots and lots or rocks surrounding them. And some craters on the moon have been dated by rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts. Using that information, we came up with a way to date craters all across the moon by their rock abundance. And from those ages, we were able to get really interesting results on how the rate of impacts may have changed over time. Probably one of the more interesting parts of this study is that it suggests that changes in the impact rate on the earth and moon have happened over time. And if they've happened over the last few hundreds of millions of years, they probably happened even further back in time. And so scientists can take these kinds of studies and this information and they can try to make connections. So is it possible aspreys were responsible for certain extinction events? Were they responsible for, let's say, changes in climate? Or what was going on And different continents at different times. These are things that scientists could start to look at with more precision, the better we understand the record. And so the record on the Earth, while it's limited, at some level we can learn a lot by understanding the moon, going to the moon and understanding what the impacts there tell us about our home planet. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Asteroids Are Slamming Into Earth Twice as Much as Before, Scientists Say","description":"Giant rocks from space are falling from the sky more than they used to, but don’t worry. 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