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Crater find could bring new insights into dinosaur extinction

2022-08-19T09:12:14.807Z


Crater find could bring new insights into dinosaur extinction Created: 08/19/2022, 11:05 am By: Miriam Haberhauer British researcher Uisdean Nicholson accidentally discovers a huge asteroid crater beneath the sea floor off the coast of West Africa. The find could provide new insights into the end of the dinosaur age. EDINBURGH - Usidean Nicholson of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh was stud


Crater find could bring new insights into dinosaur extinction

Created: 08/19/2022, 11:05 am

By: Miriam Haberhauer

British researcher Uisdean Nicholson accidentally discovers a huge asteroid crater beneath the sea floor off the coast of West Africa.

The find could provide new insights into the end of the dinosaur age.

EDINBURGH - Usidean Nicholson of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh was studying seismic data on the tectonic fissure between South America and Africa when he made the discovery of the century.

Almost 400 kilometers off the West African coast, he finds a crater about eight kilometers wide 400 meters below the sea floor.

Probably triggered by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

In order to be able to determine the cause of the crater with certainty, the researcher still needs mineral samples from the depths of the crater.

But experts already agree that only a huge asteroid could have caused such a crater.

According to a study published last Thursday in the scientific journal "Science Advances", all the facts so far speak in favor of an asteroid impact.

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(Iconic image) © Design Pics/IMAGO

With a width of eight kilometers, the "Nidar Crater", named after a nearby volcano, is significantly smaller than that of the Mexican "Chicxulub Crater", which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

However, the consequences must have been equally fatal.

"The blast would have been heard around the world and would have caused severe localized damage in the region," Nicholson told CNN.

Events of this kind are extremely unlikely.

However, it was not until February 2022 that two huge asteroids approached Earth, one of which was even considered potentially dangerous.

According to Nicholson, an asteroid of this magnitude only impacts the Earth about once every 700,000 years.

However, something similar happened in central Russia in 1908, among other places.

The consequences of this asteroid explosion a few kilometers above the earth's surface went down in history as the "Tunguska event".

The celestial body with a diameter of just 50 meters cleared trees within a radius of 1000 kilometers.

Unusual find: Researchers are hoping for findings of great scientific importance

Craters of this type are very special for researchers.

"There are fewer than 200 such confirmed impact structures on Earth," estimates US physicist Mark Boslough.

He has been involved in planetary research and geoscientific impact research since 2006, but underwater impacts like the one off the coast of West Africa have hardly been researched, especially not on this scale.

Boslough hopes that his British colleague's discovery will provide new insights into the processes involved in underwater impacts.

Experts from Science Advances attempted to graphically depict the asteroid impact and its immediate aftermath.

The graphic shows that the force of the impact first pushed rock and sediment away to the sides and upwards before forming a central elevation over the resulting crater.

Chicxulub crater: connection possible

According to Nicholson, it's possible that Nidar crater is related to the impact that caused Chicxulub crater.

Soil samples from nearby boreholes suggest the two asteroid impacts happened around the same time - 66 million years ago.

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The crater that has now been found could have come from a broken asteroid chunk of an even larger sky stone or could have been part of an asteroid rain that fell on earth over a period of one million years about 430,000 years ago.

However, it cannot be ruled out that this temporal connection is purely coincidental.

For the researcher, this raises even more questions: "If there were two impacts at the same time, could there be other craters out there?" says Nicholson.

In order to be able to answer these questions with certainty, an even more precise assessment of the time of the impact is required.

This, in turn, is only possible through further soil samples that are still pending.

The asteroid "2022 AE1" is also occupying researchers all over the world at the moment - experts fear it could hit the earth as early as 2023.

(mlh)

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-08-19

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