Did a second killer asteroid finish the dinosaurs off? Crater in West Africa hints yes.
Stephanie Pappas - 3h ago
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Alikely asteroid impact crater from the latter days of the dinosaurs has been discovered off the coast of West Africa, raising questions about whether the asteroid that wiped out the dinos may have had a smaller sibling that struck around the same time.
© Provided by SpaceThe Nadir crater, seen on seismic imagery from West Africa. The bottom of the crater, lined in green dots, sits at approximately the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene, when the dinosaurs died out.
The crater, hidden under about 3,000 feet (900 meters) of water and 1,300 feet (400 m) of sediment, hasn't been directly studied yet; it's only been detected in reconstructions of the ocean bed made using seismic waves. To prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the crater is indeed from an asteroid, scientists will need to drill into the structure and find minerals shocked by extreme heat and pressure. But the crater's shape does point to an extraterrestrial origin, said David Kring, principal scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute who was not involved in the current study but was one of the discoverers of the Chicxulub impact site, the crater left by the asteroid that killed the nonavian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.
"I have to congratulate the team for finding what looks like a probable impact crater," Kring told Live Science. "That's very important, because we have so few impact craters preserved on the Earth. Every single one that we can find provides a new window, new insights into the geological processes that shape them and their effects on biological evolution of Earth."
The new crater was formed very close in time to the Chicxulub impact, raising the possibility that the two may be related. |
