Ross-Ziegler Blip

"A tiny aberration in the fossil and carbon records of Earth, noted by two Earth geologists in 2332-and matched on several other worlds, demonstrating a gap in certain species so tiny and uniform, that it had been attributed not to a biological catastrophe, but rather had been investigated and then abandoned as odd evidence of warping or stretching of spacetime itself. The Ross-Ziegler Blip is now being opened and re-investigated in connection to the events of 2552."

- Dr. William Arthur Iqbal

The Ross-Ziegler Blip was a stratigraphic event on Earth and a number of other colonized planets named for two Earth geologists who discovered it in 2332, dating back approximately 100,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene, coinciding with the activation of the Halo Array by the Forerunners that wiped the galaxy of sentient life. Since such a massive simultaneous extinction event seemed logically impossible, especially with the unexplainable absence of any fossil evidence, the anomaly was eventually dismissed as evidence of spatial distortion until the discovery of the Array by the UNSC in 2552. Given these new discoveries, the Blip was presumably re-explained to be the result of the sudden destruction of bio-mass and sentient life at the conclusion of the Forerunner-Flood war.

Trivia

 * The event may have been named after Bonnie Ross-Ziegler, a manager at Microsoft Game Studios and studio head of 343 Industries.