Steve Braunias: 2020 - The year of absence
10 minutes to read
Steve Braunias looks back on 2020 and refuses to name the one thing that defined the year. It could have been worse. It wasn t like we suffered the utter devastation and plain unannounced rudeness of an asteroid flinging itself at the planet, like the one that struck 2.229 billion years ago in Yarrabubba, in Western Australia, and was confirmed in January as the world s oldest asteroid crater. There wasn t an awful lot of life around 2.229 billion years ago but its scant bits and pieces were put through an extinction event. It squeezed the Earth s crust to unimaginable pressures, said Curtin University researchers, describing the impact, before exploding and ejecting carnage across the landscape. 2020 was nothing like that. Well maybe a bit like that. It was quite a bad year in some respects.