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Scientists have discovered new evidence that it wasn’t just one asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. There were two of them.
It has long been thought by scientists that a six-mile-long asteroid killed all of the dinosaurs and left a 124-mile-wide crater beneath the Gulf of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Now, however, scientists at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University have discovered that there was a second asteroid that hit Earth at approximately the same time, only that giant space rock slammed into the planet off the coast of West Africa.
Located about a thousand feet under the Atlantic Ocean is what is known as the Nadir Crater, a five-mile-wide impact crater that was discovered in 2022.
Using seismic data in an attempt to confirm what created it, the scientists were able to view the crater in three dimensions for the first time. The results of that data were published recently in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Dr. Uisdean Nicholson told The Independent that the study is “the first time we’ve ever been able to see inside an impact crater.”
“So, the crater itself is about 9,200 meters [5.72 miles] – that’s what we call the rim. That’s the main central part of the crater,” Nicholson explained. “And then there’s a wider set of concentric features, or circular features, around it that we call the brim. That’s, I think, about 22,000 meters [13.67 miles] in diameter. So, that’s where the sea … bed got collapsed back in.”
That means that for an asteroid to have created a crater of that size it would have had to have been more than 1,300 feet wide.
“We haven’t had anything like this in human history,” Nicholson said.
Entering Earth’s atmosphere, the asteroid would become a fireball approximately 24 to 25 times the size of the sun, generating an enormous explosion in the air that was about a thousand times larger than the 2022 volcanic eruption in Tonga. It also would have caused a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, creating a ‘train’ of tsunamis emanating from the center of the impact.
One theory is that either this was a second asteroid that hit around the same time as the first asteroid that was previously believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs, or it was part of the same asteroid that splintered when it hit Earth’s atmosphere, causing a second massive impact crater.
The scientists hope to answer that question and more with further testing, which will include drilling down into the ocean floor to get samples of the crater.