'More than one asteroid may have crashed into Earth' during dinosaur extinction millions of years ago

'More than one asteroid may have crashed into Earth' during dinosaur extinction millions of years ago

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs.

Did another asteroid hit at that time?

Did more than one large stone fall from the sky on that fateful day?

These questions have been raised after the discovery of another giant crater, which appears to have been formed by the impact of a celestial body around the same time, on the other side of the Andhra Ocean.

This crater is not as large as the crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, but it still indicates a cataclysmic event.

Evidence

The crater, named Nedier Crater, is 300 meters below the sea floor.

The location is about 400 km offshore from the coast of Guinea, West Africa.

Based on the diameter of this crater being 8.5 km, it can be estimated that the asteroid buried there is 500 meters wide.

This hidden section was identified by Eisden Nicholson, a scientist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

He has analyzed data obtained from seismic surveys to better understand climate change on Earth in the past.

Study

Such surveys are often conducted before drilling to search for oil and natural gas.

In a survey of that nature, records are kept of the various layers of rocks and sediments beneath the ground.

And the drill is done several kilometers down.

"These studies are like doing an ultrasound of the Earth. I've spent almost 20 years analyzing them, but I've never seen anything like this before," he told BBC News.

"The shape of the Nedier crater is evidence of the impact of the asteroid. Some of its raised dill surrounds a central high and then layers of debris piled up on the outside."

The asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater is estimated to be 12 km wide.

It created a 200 km wide chasm. During that time, not only a big earthquake and tsunami but also a fiery storm spread around the world.

When a lot of dust flew from the earth and reached the sky, there was darkness and severe winter on the earth.

Dinosaurs did not survive this change.

Similar effect

By comparison, an asteroid impact to form a nadir crater may have had a much larger impact.

"Our simulations indicate that this crater formed when a 400-meter-wide asteroid hit 500-800 meters of water," said Dr. Veronica Bray said.

"It may have generated a one kilometer high tsunami and a 6.5 magnitude earthquake."

"The energy released at that time is about 1,000 times greater than when the volcano erupted in January 2022, causing a tsunami in Tonga."

Chicxulub Crater: End of the Dinosaurs

A 12-kilometer-wide mass punched a 100-kilometer-long and 30-kilometer-deep crater in the Earth

The bowl-shaped crater collapsed, leaving behind a crater 200 km wide and several kilometers deep

An inner circle was formed as the center of the crater moved back to its original position and eroded again

Even now, most of the trench is buried about 600 meters below the coast

The ground floor is covered with limestone and the exterior is marked by holes in the rock eroded by water.

When putting the incident of the two bodies falling together, Dr. Nicholson's team must be very careful.

Based on a review of fossils from drill holes, the Nadiar and Chicxulub pits are inferred to be contemporaneous.

The chronology of those fossils had already been done.

But in order to say it by knocking, the stones in the pit should be taken out and studied.

That could confirm that Nadiar is a crater formed by asteroid impact, not ancient volcanism.

The idea that giant rocks crashed down to Earth from the sky is not new.

It has been speculated that the Boltish crater in Ukraine became the Chicxulub crater. His time also does not seem to be much different.

According to Scientist Professor Shan Gulick, who co-led the recent drilling study in Chicxulub Crater, the asteroid may have hit Nadiar on the same day. Or maybe 10 or 20 million years before or after the cataclysm in Mexico, an asteroid hit the Earth.

Gulick is affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin.

Scientists can say for sure only after laboratory studies of rocks collected from the crater in West Africa.

According to him, a scenario caused by a very small asteroid impact does not add much to what we know about the dinosaur extinction. "But it adds to our knowledge of astronomical events in Chicxulub."

"Was it part of a larger mass that was very fragmented? Was Chicxulub two asteroids with the smaller mass orbiting the larger one?"

"There are such interesting questions to find answers to," he said.

A study on the neider crater was published this month in the scientific journal Science Advances.