Dig through layers of rock in North Dakota’s Badlands to discover evidence of a devastating asteroid collision with Earth about 66 million years ago, in this video from NOVA: Making North America: Life. Inside the 300-foot-thick Hell Creek Formation, a rusty orange layer consists of small glass beads. The beads indicate volcanic activity around the time the layer was deposited. However, the additional presence of a special type of quartz suggests something far more intense occurred: a large asteroid exploded with more power than a billion atomic bombs, raining droplets of molten glass over Earth’s surface and “shocking” the quartz.