Copenhagen Scientists Explained Biodiversity Explosion 469 million years ago 
the period when the seas of the Earth were inhabited by trilobites, brachiopods and conodonts. Marine biodiversity has quadrupled in just a few million years, but researchers have denied the theory that this was due to intense meteorite bombardment. This is reported in an article published in the journal Nature Communications.
According to one of the popular hypotheses, the explosion of biodiversity in the Ordovician period was due to the destruction of an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, which caused prolonged bombardment of the Earth by meteorites. This, in turn, led to the release of large amounts of dust into the atmosphere and global cooling. According to scientists, it was the low temperatures that contributed to the outbreak of biodiversity. However, in the new work, the researchers showed that the cooling occurred long before the space catastrophe – for 600 thousand years.
Experts analyzed the fossils of the ancient sedimentary layers of the seabed in Steinsodden in southern Norway. It turned out that the meteorite bombardment led to the opposite effect, that is, the stagnation of biodiversity on Earth. The dust blocked sunlight, which disrupted most of the photosynthetic processes and, as a result, the living conditions of animals in general.
The authors of the scientific work put forward a new hypothesis explaining the outbreak of biodiversity. The formation of ice caps on the planet could change the orbital parameters of the Earth, namely the tilt, rotation and configuration of the orbit itself around the Sun. This led to the long-term establishment of a colder climate and, as a result, the flourishing of marine species on Earth.