A possible impact crater under the sea off West Africa might have been made by a smaller piece that broke off the asteroid that wiped out most dinosaurs
“It definitely fits the bill for an impact crater,” saysNicholson spotted the feature in seismic reflection data supplied by the oil and gas industry. The likely crater, named the Nadir crater after a nearby seamount, is on the continental shelf a few hundred kilometres off the coast of Guinea, buried beneath around 300 metres of sediment in an area where the water is 900 metres deep.
The Nadir crater appears to have formed around 66 million years ago, the same time as the 180 kilometre-wide Chicxulub crater in what is now Mexico. That has led the team to speculate that it was made by a chunk that broke off the Chicxulub asteroid, which is estimated to have been 13 kilometres in diameter.
If this had happened just before impact, the two craters would be very close. Instead, Nicholson suggests that gravity could have broken the asteroid apart during an earlier orbit that passed closer to Earth, leading to two impacts within a few days of each other.and then struck the planet in 1994. At least 21 fragments hit Jupiter over a six-day period.
It is possible that the Chicxulub asteroid broke up into several fragments too, says Nicholson. Other or could have been destroyed by tectonic processes. Craters don’t form when asteroids hit water several kilometres deep, as most of our oceans are.
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