Researchers say they’ve discovered a big affect crater on the Atlantic seafloor that seems to be 66 million years previous. That means no matter made this crater hit Earth across the similar time because the rock that famously slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the reign of the dinosaurs.

The newly found geological function—off the coast of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa—is known as the Nadir crater; it’s effectively over 5 miles broad and sits a quarter-mile beneath the seafloor and practically 3,000 toes of water. A paper describing the crater’s geological construction and sure origins is published in Science Advances.

In their analysis, the staff proposes three potential origins for the big crater: that it got here from the identical mother or father physique because the Chicxulub asteroid, which broke up because it approached Earth; {that a} collision within the asteroid belt despatched a smattering of asteroids towards Earth in the identical million-year time-frame; or that the timing of the 2 impacts was purely coincidental.

“If the first scenario is correct (same parent asteroid) it provides some really important new information about what happened—both in space and on Earth—during that event,” mentioned Uisdean Nicholson, a geoscientist at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and lead writer of the brand new paper, in an e-mail to Gizmodo.

Lots of proof suggests that almost all life on Earth died after an asteroid strike 66 million years in the past. The affect resulted in huge earthquakes, tsunamis, and above all a nuclear winter, which drastically altered the local weather. About three-quarters of life on Earth was worn out by the occasion, together with all the non-avian dinosaurs.

“The asteroid responsible for Chicxulub is far bigger than that which we propose for Nadir,” Nicholson wrote. “We would expect around 10,000 times more energy to be released from Chicxulub. So the Nadir impact would have been dwarfed by Chicxulub.”

Nevertheless, “Nadir on its own would represent a very significant regional hazard, with major earthquake, tsunami and airblast,” Nicholson added.

The researchers recognized the subterranean crater utilizing seismic reflection, a way by which strain waves are despatched by way of the ocean and the seafloor to detect the totally different constructions all through the deep-lying sediments. It’s a comparable precept to lidar, a expertise archaeologists use to see ruins hiding beneath dense foliage.

The crater seems to be attributable to an affect, according to the study authors, primarily based on its measurement and the ratios of its top and width. Computer fashions indicated that the asteroid that triggered the crater was about 1,300 toes throughout and would’ve launched about 1,000 instances the vitality of the huge volcanic eruption in Tonga final yr, an occasion so intense scientists thought of including a completely new class for excessive eruptions.

But its scale is barely a small piece of the puzzle. The most intriguing factor of the crater is its age—it seems to have fashioned at roughly the identical time the dinosaurs went extinct.

“It would be unusual to have this newly discovered crater, the 24 km-diameter Boltysh crater, and Chicxulub impact all within around [1 million years],” Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University who focuses on affect cratering, instructed Gizmodo in an e-mail. “If there’s a connection among all three, their separation requires formation related to the break-up of an asteroid so that the fragments intersected the Earth’s orbit.”

First, the staff should certify the origins of the crater, which can take some doing. “We cannot definitively state that this is an impact crater until we recover physical samples of shocked minerals from the crater floor,” Nicholson mentioned. The staff has proposed a plan to gather a pattern of the crater with a drill. They then may precisely date the crater’s age from the core.

The coring work received’t happen earlier than 2024, Nicholson mentioned. But if it takes two years to determine what precisely occurred 66 million years in the past, it’ll have been definitely worth the wait.

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