Comet impact
1: Tree-ring data could be evidence for
the impact of a comet similar to Hale-
Bopp around 1500 years ago. (Hale-
Bopp image courtesy Peter Böhm.)
A comet impact in AD536?
Emma Rigby, Melissa Symonds and Derek Ward-Thompson review the evidence for the possibility that a comet
may have impacted the Earth in historical times, and discuss the size of the putative comet.
Abstract
A global climatic downturn has previously
been observed in tree-ring data associated
with the years AD 536–545. We review the
evidence for the explanation of this event
which involves a comet fragment
impacting the Earth and exploding in the
upper atmosphere. The explosion would
create a plume, such as was seen during
the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
with Jupiter. The resulting debris
deposited by the plume on to the top of
the atmosphere would increase the opacity
and lower the temperature. We calculate
the size of the comet required, and find
that a relatively small fragment of only
about half a kilometre in diameter could
be consistent with the data. We conclude
that plume formation is a by-product of
small comet impacts that must be added
to the list of significant global hazards
posed by near-Earth objects.
February 2004 Vol 45
T
he Earth is bombarded every day by
debris from space. The majority of this
debris takes the form of very small par-
ticles of dust. These objects are known as
meteoroids which, as they run into the Earth’s
atmosphere, produce meteors – also known as
shooting stars. Such objects are rarely haz-
ardous. However, there are also much less fre-
quent collisions with larger objects ranging in
size from tens of metres to kilometres across,
which may be asteroids or comets. Asteroids are
primarily rocky or metallic in composition,
whereas comets are composed mainly of a vari-
ety of ices with some rock. Objects of this size
are generally more of a hazard. In fact, the UK
government even set up a Near Earth Object
Task Force to evaluate the risks of impacts from
such objects (Atkinson et al. 2000). Depending
on the size and strength of the material of the
meteoroid, it may explode in the atmosphere
before reaching the ground. Such an event is
known as an airburst. An airbursting object
releases energy in the form of a shockwave,
which can devastate large areas and trigger
forest fires. Airbursts can also produce a high-
altitude haze of particles, such as was seen in
the 1908 Tunguska event.
The AD 536 event
In AD 536 an event occurred which caused sig-
nificant climatic change. Dendrochronological
(tree-ring) evidence in oak trees salvaged from
Irish peat bogs indicates a sequence of colder
than average summers at this time (Baillie 1991,
1999). A similar effect is seen in Fennoscandian
pine trees (Briffa et al. 1990), and a study of
European oak tree data as a whole shows that
the event starts in 536 and lasts until 545
(Baillie 1994). Figure 1 shows the typical vari-
ation in tree-ring widths.
North American bristle-cone and foxtail pines
(La Marche 1974, Scuderi 1990), Mongolian
tree rings (D’Arrigo et al. 2001) and Argentinean
tree-ring data (Baillie 1999) all show the same
effect. The decrease in rate of growth in these
years corresponds to a global temperature
decrease of up to ~3 °C (Briffa et al. 1990,
Scuderi 1990). In fact, 536 is noted as one of the
1.23

50
Drumard
Mill
40
ring widths
30
Q2159
Q2149
20 Q2148
Q2168
10
0
510 520 530 540
date AD
2: Dendrochronological data showing the decreases in the rate of tree-ring growth for the years around AD 540.
(Left) Irish oak trees (adapted from Baillie 1999). (Right) US foxtail pine chronologies (adapted from Scuderi 1990).
coldest two or three years globally in the last
2000 years (Briffa et al. 1990, Scuderi 1993,
Baillie 1999). Figure 2 shows the results for the
Irish oak trees and the US foxtail pines.
There are also some limited historical records
from the same period, which record the presence
of a “dust veil”. Chinese records refer to
obscured skies and summer frosts (Baillie 1999).
Mediterranean historians also record a “dry fog”
event. Procopius (Dewing 1916) records that:
“the Sun gave forth its light without brightness,
like the Moon, during this whole year, and it
seemed exceedingly like the Sun in eclipse”,
and Michael the Syrian (Chabot 1901) states:
“the Sun was dark and its darkness lasted for
eighteen months; each day it shone for about
four hours, and still this light was only a fee-
ble shadow”.
The sixth-century British monastic writer
Gildas talks of large-scale fires and widespread
destruction of the landscape at around the same
time (Winterbotham 1978). Previously Gildas
has been thought to have been talking allegor-
ically, with his many biblical references.
However, he may have been describing the
actual events taking place at this time.
There have been two theories put forward to
account for this cataclysmic climatic event. One
idea is that a giant “super-volcano” erupted in
536, causing the effects described above
(Stothers 1984, Keys 1999). The alternative sce-
nario invokes an impact by an asteroid or comet
(Clube and Napier 1984).
The super-volcano theory has several problems.
Firstly, no terrestrial volcano can be satisfactorily
identified with this event. Secondly, a super-vol-
cano would be expected to produce significant
acidity in the atmosphere. This acidity would be
recorded in the polar ice caps. Numerous ice-core
studies have been carried out in both Greenland
and Antarctica (see, for example, Clausen et al.
1.24
Comet impact
USA
foxtail
550 500 520 540
date AD
1997, Hammer et al. 1997). None of these has
found evidence for a significant acid layer
around 536 of the sort that would be caused by
the eruption of a super-volcano.
There are small acid layers associated with
528 and 533, but they are not sufficiently strong
that they can be related to a super-volcano
(Clausen et al. 1997). In addition there is an
Antarctic ice acid layer dated as 504±40
(Hammer et al. 1997), which has been argued
could be related to the 536 event (Keys 1999).
However, once again this is not the depth of
layer that one would expect of a super-volcano
(Baillie 1999). Other measurements have
proved inconclusive. For example, in one case
an ice core broke up across the crucial period
(Zielinski et al. 1994) and in another the exact
dating proved controversial (Hammer 1984).
The scenario involving an impact by an aster-
oid or comet may have seemed far-fetched at
one time, but recent scientific evidence indi-
cates that such impacts may be more common
than was once believed. The impact of comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) with Jupiter in 1994
provided dramatic and direct evidence of the
damage that even quite small impacts can gen-
erate. Figure 3 shows an example of some
images of the SL9 impact event. In addition,
the impact of a comet or asteroid is now
believed to be responsible for the considerable
climatic changes at the end of the Cretaceous
period (Alvarez et al. 1980).
Forest fires
No known impact crater can be linked to the
536 event so, if it were due to a comet collision,
then the crater may lie unrecognized in a region
such as the seabed (unlikely, given that the
seabed has now been very well surveyed), or
else the comet must have been destroyed in an
airburst. If the airburst had sufficient energy to
560 580 600
ignite one or more large-scale forest fires (Hills
and Goda 1993, Adushkin and Nemchinov
1994), we can calculate whether the soot emis-
sions from these fires were sufficient to cause
the observed climatic effects.
During the Cold War much effort went into
modelling the secondary effects of a conflict
involving nuclear weapons, including large-scale
fires and related atmospheric effects, referred to
collectively as a nuclear winter (see, for exam-
ple, Turco et al. 1983, 1990, Crutzen and Birks
1992). The basic hypothesis is that the extensive
fires started by nuclear explosions would gen-
erate a sufficiently large quantity of soot in the
upper atmosphere to affect its radiation balance
and cause a change in the Earth’s albedo. The
net result is reduced solar heating at the Earth’s
surface and hence a lower temperature. This
would produce significantly colder summers
and hence reduced tree-ring growth. We can use
such models to study fires started by a comet
impact, since they provide estimates of the soot
yields from appropriate masses of relevant flam-
mable materials. We choose the model of Turco
et al. (1990) to make our comparison. This
model finds that ~1011 kg of soot injected into
the troposphere is sufficient to produce the
effect known as a nuclear winter.
It has been found that airbursting comets can
start fires more easily than asteroids (Hills and
Goda 1993). This occurs because comets tend
to dissipate their energy higher in the atmos-
phere, which has two main effects. The high-
altitude energy dissipation allows them to
illuminate a much larger area of the Earth.
Simultaneously the high altitude of the airburst
makes it more difficult for the associated
atmospheric shockwaves to reach the Earth’s
surface and blow out the fire. We note that cal-
culations on the size of an impacting comet
required to ignite pine forests show that an
February 2004 Vol 45
 Comet impact

object radius of more than 100 m is needed for

3: A sequence of
such an ignition, setting an effective lower limit.
images of
Dendrochronological data and historical Shoemaker-Levy 9
records indicate that Northern Europe is the impacting Jupiter 20.15 UT methane
most likely geographical location for the impact in 1994, showing
(Baillie 1999). However, we note that this sug- evidence for a
gestion is not critical to the model of large-scale plume near the
terminator at the
fires, and any equivalent land area would suf- time of the A
fice, provided that it was appropriately forested. 20.18 UT red
impact. During the
In the sixth century Europe’s most flammable temporal sequence
species of tree was the pine tree and forests in from top to bottom,
Northern Europe were largely composed of the spreading of
the bright feature
pine trees (Rackham 1993), so a forest fire there 20.21 UT
is the plume falling blue
is possible. A study of fire behaviour from large- back on to the
scale biomass burning (Einfeld et al. 1991) pro- jovian atmosphere
vides the following equation for the amount of (HST data archive).
smoke injected into the troposphere by large-
scale forest fires: 20.24 UT violet
MX = MF AB FC EX (1)
where MX is the mass yield of a particular
gaseous or particulate species X, MF is the fuel
load in terms of mass per unit area, AB is the
area burned, FC is the fractional consumption 20.27 UT UV
of the total fuel load and EX is the emission fac-
tor for the species of interest. We can use this
equation to estimate what size of forest fire
would have been required to produce the cool-
ing recorded in the dendrochronological data.
To calculate MF we assume one tree per hun- 4: Model of a 15
dred square metres of forest (Rackham 1993), megaton equivalent 4.5 km/s
which when combined with a typical tree mass yield comet airburst
gives a fuel load of MF ~ 20 kg m–2. For EX we forming a plume
over the Earth 100
take a value of 1% (Turco et al. 1990) and for
seconds after
the fractional consumption FC we assume 10%. impact (adapted
Inserting these values into equation 1, we find from Boslough and
that we would need a forest fire to cover the Crawford 1997).
240 km
whole of Northern Europe (~5×1012 m2) to inject
into the troposphere the ~1011 kg of soot required
by the nuclear winter model described above. mesosphere
Such a large conflagration seems somewhat
unlikely as there would almost certainly have shockwave 90 km
been some form of historical or archaeological
stratosphere
record of such a fire. Furthermore, the climatic troposphere
effects may not last for the time required by the
tree-ring data, since soot in the troposphere has
a tendency to precipitate out. Consequently, for- a 15 megaton equivalent yield comet airburst This was a much smaller comet than SL9, but
est fires may have added to the events of 536, but over the Earth (Boslough and Crawford 1997). the chief effects appear to change only in scale.
they cannot explain all of the data. The comet plunges into the upper atmosphere, The sequence of events remains the same:
leaving an effectively hollow tube behind it, impact; airburst; plume.
Atmospheric plumes where it has been, and into which the sur- An eye-witness drawing of the Tunguska event
When comet SL9 broke up into many pieces rounding air has not yet had time to diffuse. actually resembles the model plume of figure 4,
and collided with Jupiter in 1994, astronomers This tube then acts rather like a gun barrel, and many witnesses across northern Russia and
had their first opportunity in modern times to focusing much of the energy of the airburst Europe noted that the sky was light at night for
study in detail a large comet impact with a explosion along the tube and carrying with it a few days afterwards. This effect can be
planet. Many previously unpredicted effects much of the comet debris. This is what causes explained as noctilucent clouds caused by
were seen, including giant plumes above the the observed plume, as material is fired along material from the plume.
impact sites and huge scars where each frag- the tube by the force of the explosion.
ment had hit. This led several people to model The plume expands once it has exited the top The size of the comet
in detail the effects of such collisions. The sim- of the atmosphere and the material within it There was no significant global cooling in
ilarity was noted between the impact of SL9 then falls back on to the top of the atmosphere. 1908 so any comet required to explain the 536
with a largely gaseous body such as Jupiter and This is the explanation for the observed scars on event must be larger than the comet which
the airburst of a comet impacting the Earth. Jupiter. However, figure 4 has been used to exploded in the air over Tunguska. The best
Figure 4 shows some results from a model of model the Tunguska comet impact of 1908. estimate for the size of the Tunguska comet is

February 2004 Vol 45 1.25


a few tens of metres in diameter. We can use the
model illustrated in figure 4, together with an
estimate of the optical depth of the 536 dust
veil, to calculate the size of comet fragment
required to cause the 536 event.
The dry-fog event noted in the Mediterranean
area has been estimated from the description of
the Sun to correspond to an optical depth of
~2.5 (Stothers 1984). However, we would ques-
tion this estimate. It was based purely on
assumptions of what was meant in historical
records by “the Sun appearing like the Moon”
and hence by how much this implied the Sun
had dimmed. We can make alternative estimates
based on the tree-ring data, which require a
decrease in temperature of only up to ~3 °C
(Briffa et al. 1990, Scuderi 1990).
The temperature of the Earth’s surface, TE , is
proportional to LI1/4, where LI is the incident lumi-
nosity at the surface of the Earth. If the dust veil
had an optical depth of τ then LI would be
decreased by e–τ and the temperature at the
Earth’s surface under the dust veil, TD, is given by:
TD = TE e–τ/4 (2)
Taking TE ≈ 300 K and using the maximum
temperature decrease of 3 K, we calculate the
maximum value required for τ is ~0.04, which
is considerably less than the previous estimate.
We make the assumption that the entire mass
of the comet is destroyed in the airburst and
ejected via the plume. Thereafter the dust con-
denses out and is deposited on to the top of the
atmosphere as small particles of dusty debris.
This debris is then spread around the globe
roughly uniformly. The dust-to-gas mass ratio
in a comet can range from ~0.1 to 10 (see, for
instance, Weiler et al. 2003 and references
therein), so we take a value of order unity (i.e.
Mdust ≈ 0.5 Mcomet).
The optical depth τ is then related to the num-
ber of dusty particles Nd by the equation:
Nd πa2 Nd a2
τ≈  = (3)
4πRE2 4RE2
where a is the typical radius of a particle and
RE is the radius of the Earth. Nd is simply given
by the ratio of the dust mass of the comet to the
mass of a dusty particle. Hence Nd is given by
the ratio of the comet density to the dust parti-
cle density (a factor ~0.5 – see, for example,
Fitzsimmons et al. 1996, and references
therein), multiplied by the fraction of the
comet’s mass that is dust (~0.5), multiplied by
the ratio of the cube of the comet radius RC to
the particle radius a. Thus:
0.25RC3 a2 RC3
τ≈  = (4)
4a3 RE2 16aRE2
and the comet radius is given by:
RC ≈ (16aτRE2)1/3 (5)
We know the radius of the Earth (6.4×106 m)
and we assume a typical particle radius to be
1.26
Comet impact
similar to that of particles in the interstellar
medium of ~10–6 m (e.g. Fitzsimmons et al.
1996). Hence we find that a τ of 0.04 requires
a comet radius of only ~300 m.
Clearly such calculations contain many
approximations and assumptions. Some of the
numbers that go into this estimate are rather
uncertain. We particularly note that we are rely-
ing on atmospheric effects to spread the dust
evenly over the top of the atmosphere.
Nonetheless, the result is interesting. It puts the
comet size as intermediate between the
Tunguska comet and SL9 and makes it signifi-
cantly smaller than the comet thought respon-
sible for the dinosaur extinction.
A comparison between the 536 event and the
SL9 impact with Jupiter can provide a useful
cross-check to our size calculations. The frag-
ments of SL9 that collided with Jupiter ranged
in diameter from 300 m to 2 km. The scars cre-
ated on Jupiter were typically about the size of
the Earth or larger. This appears to corroborate
our basic premise that a relatively small fragment
could have been responsible for the 536 event.
We note that a collision with a comet or aster-
oid of this size has been predicted to occur on the
Earth once in several thousand years (Morrison
et al. 1994). Consequently we should not be sur-
prised to find evidence for such an impact within
the 7000-year dendrochronological record.
Conclusions
The surprising result of these calculations is just
how small a comet fragment we have estimated
was needed to cause the observed effects. A
comet less than a kilometre in diameter has not
been previously considered to represent a global
hazard (as opposed to a local hazard), let alone
one half a kilometre across. For example, the
UK government’s Near Earth Object Task
Force classified impacts from objects in the size
range 300–1500 m to be a “large sub-global
hazard” (Atkinson et al. 2000) and only rec-
ommended monitoring programmes of near-
Earth objects greater than a kilometre in size.
Yet our estimates show that if plume formation
is a common by-product of cometary airbursts
(as is believed to be the case), then a relatively
small comet fragment can have a global effect.
A possible origin for this object could be the
Taurid meteor stream. This stream is the result
of the fragmentation of a much larger comet
some 20 000 years ago (Bailey et al. 1990). The
Earth passes through the Taurid stream in
November and June each year, resulting in reg-
ular meteor showers normally consisting of
microscopic dust particles. A fragmentation of
the stream is thought to have occurred around
500 (Clube and Napier 1984). It is possible that
a fragment could then have collided with the
Earth as it passed through the beta portion of
the stream early in 536, causing the atmospheric
dust-veil event.
One other historical aspect of the period
around 536 may also be significant. This
period coincides with a mass population
decrease in Europe. This is commonly known
as the Justinian Plague, and is believed to be the
first appearance of the Black Death in Europe
(Russell 1968). The relevance to our hypothesis
is that crop failures for several years in a row
while the dust veil was present may have caused
widespread starvation, leading to an increased
susceptibility to disease among the remaining
population. Small comets had previously been
thought to be less hazardous than small aster-
oids, but our estimates show that a small comet
fragment can have a global effect.
If such an event happened today, and crops
failed over a significant part of the globe for
several consecutive years, then once again a
large percentage of the world’s population
would face starvation. ●
Emma Rigby, Cardiff University, UK (now at
Edinburgh University, UK); Melissa Symonds,
Cardiff University; Derek Ward-Thompson, Cardiff
University. The authors thank Mike Baillie, Mark
Bailey, Martin Johnson, Ted Johnson-South and
David Williams for interesting and helpful
discussions.
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