By Devin Powell
A meteorite maelstrom that pummeled Earth and pocked the moon with craters billions of years ago may have had a silver lining — and linings made of other metals, too.
New evidence from old rocks suggests that many of the precious metals mined today were delivered to the planet by a bombardment of stony meteorites called chondrites that lasted for hundreds of millions of years.
“Adding a tiny amount of chondritic material could explain where many present-day metals came from,” says Matthias Willbold, a geochemist at the University of Bristol in England whose team reports the new findings in the Sept. 8 Nature.