It has long been believed that the impact of an asteroid on Earth caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. A recent discovery may lead to some development in this theory. Scientists have spotted a mysterious asteroid impact crater on the ocean floor that is believed to have formed around the same time that the dinosaurs were wiped out from the planet. This could mean that not one, but two asteroid impacts were behind the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The crater named Nadir is located at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa. Researchers believe it is the result of an asteroid that collided with Earth about 66 million years ago. Notably, it was around this time that the Chicxulub asteroid impacted leave the place The coast of today’s Yucatan, Mexico and wiped out dinosaur populations.
The Nadir Crater, measuring 5 miles in diameter, was accidentally discovered by geologist Usden Nicholson of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. When he came across the crater he was reviewing seismic survey data for a separate research project expanding on the ocean floor.
Named after a nearby seamount, Nadir Crater is 1,300 feet below sea level and about 250 miles off the coast of Guinea, West Africa. The team believes that the asteroid that formed Nadir Crater may have broken off from the parent asteroid or was part of a swarm of asteroids during that time.
In new study, research scientists Veronica Bray Through computer simulations, tried to know the type of collision that made the crater and its impacts. He observed that the crater-forming asteroid was 1,300 feet wide and hit the planet between 1,600 and 2,600 feet of water.
“This would have generated a tsunami 3,000 feet high, as well as an earthquake of magnitude greater than 6.5. Although it is much smaller than the global catastrophe of the Chicxulub effect, the nadir would have contributed significantly to the local devastation. And if we had found a ‘in Chicxulub’ brother and sister’, this opens the question: Are there others?” Told Bre. She is also the co-author of study published in science advance.
Another co-author, Sean Gulick, said that the nadir crater impact was smaller than the Chicxulub impactor, but its existence calls for investigation of “the possibility of an impact cluster in the latest Cretaceous”.
