Researchers are looking into the possibility that another asteroid may have struck Earth at around the same time as the one that is thought to have wiped out almost all dinosaur life.
A smaller crater that was only recently found in the water is connected to the inquiry. According to researchers, a large asteroid may have formed the crater.
Long held theory among scientists is that a sizable asteroid struck Earth close to Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago. According to their calculations, the impact's force was equivalent to roughly 10 billion nuclear bombs.
The strike, or impact, is thought to have sparked numerous wildfires, large ocean waves, tsunamis, and numerous earthquakes. Additionally, according to scientists, the incident resulted in a chemical release into the atmosphere that caused severe cooling.
More than 70 percent of plant and animal life is thought to have vanished as a result of climate change. Any dinosaurs that did not resemble birds perished.
The impact left a massive crater that was 900 meters deep and 180 kilometers broad.
According to recent research published in Science Advances, this second asteroid may have split off from the infamous Chicxulub dinosaur-killer, or it may have been a component of a cluster of impacts that occurred at precisely the same time.
Dinosaurs Might Have Been Double Tapped by Two Asteroids
Chicxulub is the reigning champion of heavenly insults, having wiped off almost 80 percent of all mammals 66 million years ago, though it's plausible that it wasn't acting alone.
Off the coast of West Africa, scientists had found a new probable impact crater that may have been one-half of a one-two punch around the time when the dinosaurs went extinct.
Uisdean Nicholson from the School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society at Heriot-Watt University was searching through seismic reflection data for an unrelated scientific project when he came upon the geological formation, which he named Nadir.
Since roughly 20 years ago, Nicholson, a geoscientist from Heriot-Watt University in the UK, has been deciphering such surveys. But he told BBC News that he has "never seen anything like this."
Is This Related to The Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid?
According to The Conversation, Nadir has characteristics compatible with an impact origin, even if scientists haven't determined that it was brought on by an asteroid.
These characteristics include Nadir's estimates, its height to breadth ratio, and the height of the crater rim. Deposits around Nadir also resemble materials that were thrown from a crater following an impact.
Computer modeling revealed that an asteroid would have needed to be around 0.25 miles big and strike an ocean more than 2,600 feet deep to have caused this impact.
The Chicxulub asteroid, by contrast, was probably about six miles broad. However, the second effect would have been significant.
Researchers told BBC News that the energy released would have been 1,000 times larger than that from the Tonga eruption and tsunami in January 2022.
According to the scientists, the impact would have produced shock waves comparable to a magnitude 6.5 or 7 earthquakes, precipitating undersea landslides and a succession of tsunamis.
"The discovery of a terrestrial impact crater is always significant because they are very rare in the geologic record," Mark Boslough, an earth and planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the research, told CNN.
"There are fewer than 200 confirmed impact structures on Earth and quite a few likely candidates that haven't yet been unequivocally confirmed," added Boslough.
Scientists will need to dig into the formation and gather samples in order to confirm that Nadir was in fact, created by an asteroid hit, as well as to pinpoint the exact timing of the crash and tie it to Chicxulub. According to National Geographic, the team has already requested emergency funding for this further study.
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