Compared to the Chicxulub crater on the sea floor off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the newly discovered crater off the coast of West Africa is very small. It is only about 8.5 kilometers in diameter compared to the 180-kilometre impact site on the other side of the Atlantic. But the discovery, described by Osden Nicholson of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and his team in Advances in Science, could help explain the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago..
With the help of seismic reflection data from beneath the surface in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa, the working team discovered the crater, which has been covered by a layer of sediment 300 to 400 meters thick since the impact. Corresponding age dating indicates that the impact may have occurred at most a million years after Chicxulub – and perhaps even immediately after the largest impact. According to Nicholson & Co., the isotope structure on the sea floor has the typical features of an asteroid crater, for example a central elevation, which would not be found in the event of an underground magma chamber collapse.
Therefore, the most likely explanation is the presence of an asteroid with a diameter of about 400 meters, which was launched into the sea, which was only 800 meters deep at that point. Objects of this size have collided with Earth regularly in the past; Thus, the temporal proximity of Chicxulub could be purely coincidental. However, they may have hit Earth around the same time because it was a binary asteroid. A previous blow into space may have hit Chicxulub and tore it in two unequal parts. Earth’s gravity could have done this as well before the pieces crashed into the planet. After all, it is estimated that 14 percent of craters on Venus come from binary asteroids, while on Earth only 2 to 4 percent are known so far.
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