ANALYSIS: We've discovered a mystery crater that could be related to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs
Intriguingly, the crater, named "Nadir" after the nearby volcano Nadir Seamount, is of the same age as the Chicxulub impact
Many of its features are consistent with an impact origin, including the scale of the crater, the ratio of height to width and the height of the crater rim. The presence of chaotic deposits outside of the crater floor also look like "ejecta" — material expelled from the crater immediately following a collision.We did consider other possible processes that could have formed such a crater, such as the collapse of a submarine volcano or a pillar of salt below the seabed.
The air blast from the explosion would be larger than anything heard on Earth in recorded history. The energy released would be approximately a thousand times larger than that from the The break-up event could have formed by an earlier near-collision, when the asteroid or comet passed close enough to Earth to experience gravitational forces strong enough to pull it apart. The actual collision could then have occurred on a subsequent orbit.Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet
This collision may have sent a shower of asteroids into the inner solar system, which may have collided with the Earth and other inner planets over a more extended time period, perhaps a million years or more. We have a precedent for such an event back in the Ordovician period — over 400 million years ago — when there wereFinally, of course, this may just be a coincidence. We do expect a collision of a Nadir-sized asteroid every 700,000 years or so.
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